Profiles in Success...Volume 6 eBook

Copyright 2014 © Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF® ISBN: 978-0-9849572-6-2 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 6 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, Ken Robinson, Olivia Dewey, Trent White, Bonnie Armstrong, Kate Brodowski , 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 Tien Wong, CEO of Tech 2000, Inc., and Peter Schwartz, host of Executive Leaders DC 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

81 Dallice Joyner

3 Introduction

85 W. Matt Kelly

Profiles in Success

89 Joshua Konowe

5 Manish Agarwal

93 Allan Kullen

9 Dan Aldridge

97 Bill Lauer

13 Francisca Villarroel Alonso

101 Marissa Levin

17 Murtaza Amil

105 Tom Loftus

21 Christopher Archer

109 Gulnara Mirzakarimova

25 Ethan Assal

113 Sylvia S. Montgomery

29 Kristina Bouweiri

117 Michael Mosel

33 Laurie Keyser Brunner

121 Charles Nahabedian

37 Betty Buck

125 Keith Scandone

41 Hilary Fordwich

129 David Schmidt

45 Norman Fortier

133 David Steiner

49 Jeff Gallimore

137 Julia Stephens

53 Michael Goldstein

141 Chris Syllaba

57 Tim Green

145 Solomon Thompson, Jr.

61 Jorge Haddock

149 Roger Waldron

65 Babak Hafezi

153 Mark Watts

69 John Holaday

157 Jim White

73 Atul Jain

161 Dendy Young

77 Sonya Jain

165 From Gifford to Hickman

by Gloria J. Bernhardt

Foreword A couple of years ago, I was invited to be a guest on Executive Leaders Radio, and there I met Gordon Bernhardt.

He invited me to tell my story for publication in his Profiles in Success series. What was supposed to be a one hour taped interview lasted over 2 1/2 hours. I found Gordon to be sincere, authentic, and engaging, and I enjoyed our conversation very much. Since then, Gordon and I have spent more time together, and I am continually impressed at his attention to detail and focus on quality in everything he does.

When Gordon Bernhardt asked me to write this Foreward to the latest Volume of his Profiles in Success series, I was very flattered. As a previous biography, and a longtime fan of this series it is quite an honor to do this.

There are many definitions of “success” and the one I like and subscribe to is the pursuit of one’s passion to the maximum extent of one’s capabilities. For me, passion and success are two sides of the same coin. The common theme of all of Gordon’s biographies is that they are all pursuing their passion and dreams to the max. Some have achieved awesome financial success, and others have had a huge impact on society. Some have raised terrific children, and others have pursued their passion in faith and in serving our great country.

What Gordon is doing through his Profiles in Success biographies is pursuing his own personal passion for studying and documenting the stories of success people. By writing and publishing nearly 300 such biographies, he is also doing a tremendous service for the Greater Washington, DC business community as a whole.

“No.” An almost obsessive focus on one’s objectives and goals are what I am talking about here.

You also need Courage. The best planning in the world and all the desire in the world is useless without action. And Courage is what gets successful people to take action and execute.

Finally, you need Persistence, intestinal fortitude, whatever you want to call it. Successful people must be able to absorb the body blows, the negative noise from doubters, the selfdoubt; and get up every morning ready to go to the field of battle to pursue their dreams. Persistence is my favorite of these success prerequisites, and I conclude this Foreward with my favorite quote, which is about the Persistence every biography in this Volume exhibits: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

- Winston Churchill I hope you find this volume of Profiles in Success to be as enjoyable, entertaining, and informative as previous volumes.

S. Tien Wong CEO, Tech 2000, Inc. Chairman, Lore Systems, Inc. tienwong.wordpress.com

SUCCESS FORMULA Since this series is all about “Success,” let me describe the Success Formula which I have discovered and synthesized from reading dozens of motivational and business books over the years, as well as by observing successful people: S = BD + G + F + C + P, whereby S = Success, BD = Burning Desire, G = Goal setting, F = Focus, C = Courage to take action, and P = Persistence. These are the 4 absolute necessary ingredients for success. As you read through these stories, you may want to keep this formula in mind and see if it matches up to how these successful people got to where they are.

It all starts with Burning Desire, which can come from a passion or driving force for someone. It could also be overcompensation for an insecurity or something that happened in childhood. Whatever the cause, that burning desire has to be there as the spark for achievement.

Goal setting is the road map for getting to your destination.

Almost every successful person I know has written goals which he or she regularly evaluates and monitors. Focus is another necessary ingredient. Steve Jobs is not the only captain of industry who has attributed his success to saying

Tien Wong is the CEO of Tech 2000, Inc. a Northern Virginia based leading provider of technology training, mobile e-learning, and mobile content management platforms to commercial, government, and educational institution clients. He is also Chairman of Lore Systems, an SBA- certified HUBZone company which provides IT support and network engineering to government and commercial clients. Previously, he was cofounder and CEO of CyberRep, one of the largest privately held CRM outsourcing companies in the world. He is a recognized international expert in CRM, direct marketing, and BPO, having presented at dozens of industry events around the world and written numerous articles on the subjects. Wong serves on numerous boards including the CIT GAP Fund’s Investment Advisory Board, the Potomac Officer’s Club, Startup Maryland, and FounderCorps. He was appointed by Governor Martin O’Mally to the 9-member Maryland Venture Fund Authority which allocates and manages $84 million of capital invested into top tier venture funds. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and a graduate of Dartmouth College.

Foreword

1

Introduction Chemistry

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – C.G. Jung, founder of analytical psychology.

In the simplest terms, chemistry is the way two individuals relate to each other. It isn’t just for the loveat-first-sight romance seekers. In fact, it is a critical component of any successful business relationship.

Of the six core characteristics which I believe a trusted financial advisor should possess – character, chemistry, caring, competence, cost-effective and consultative – chemistry is perhaps the most subjective. After all, we typically determine almost instantly if it exists or not and we can rarely put into words why it occurs with one person but not with another who on paper may register every bit as compatible.

In fact, social psychologists have identified many elements that influence interpersonal attraction, including: physical attractiveness, propinquity, responsiveness, similarity and reciprocal liking (“Interpersonal attraction,” 2010). According to these five most-studied factors, we apparently like those who live or work near us, are nice-looking and similar to us, as well as those who are responsive to us and who like us, too.

Whatever it is that makes us click with another individual let’s face it – you have to have chemistry with your financial advisor. You have to be comfortable enough with this person to share your hopes and dreams and even your fears.

In my experience, chemistry begins when you find an advisor with good listening skills. And that doesn’t mean someone who sits across the desk and continually nods like a bobble head doll when you talk. Really listening involves inviting you to open up, taking to heart what you say, asking relevant questions, and helping you place your goals or worries in context of the bigger picture.

As far as I’m concerned, that intangible, knowit-when-you-feel-it good chemistry serves as the foundation for cooperative problem solving. That’s because feeling comfortable with each other enables us to ask each other questions and work together to find the right answers. I am confident that you are honestly sharing important information about your situation

and you can trust that I am making recommendations that are in your best interest.

Finally, because the planning process requires some work and it’s a relationship that should ideally be long-term, it’s worth it to put the time and energy in upfront to ensure that the financial advisor you select is someone you like. Of course, you want an advisor with the expertise and skills to manage your wealth, but it sure helps if that person is also someone with whom you honestly enjoy talking.

Just as satisfaction with your co-workers affects your overall job satisfaction – and your overall happiness – so too, can an enjoyable relationship with your advisor positively impact both the planning process and your general sense of well-being.

Whether we realize it or not, chemistry plays a significant role in various areas of our personal and professional life. The following profiles share intimate details of how and why the individuals succeeded in their chosen fields. Very often the chemistry they experienced with another individual played a role in their eventual success. Who did you just click with?

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, DC 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.

Introduction

3

Manish Agarwal The Culture of Collaboration As a teenager, Manish Agarwal would stay up until two or three in the morning with his friends. Yet, while this seems typical for someone of that age, he was not out partying as so many of his peers were doing; nor was he locking himself away from the world to pour over his school books. Instead, Manish and his friends were dreaming.

These dreaming sessions consisted of brainstorms that sprung new possibilities. They sounded business ideas off one another and challenged each other’s creative thinking. “That’s where the best ideas came out,” Manish remembers today. “You experience so much every day, and through those conversations, we were able to process those experiences, synthesizing them and coming up with what we wanted to really do with our lives.

Today, I think it’s hard for young people because they don’t have an easy outlet to express those thought processes. I look back now and see I learned so much from those conversations.”

It was during those late-night brainstorming sessions that Manish first conceived of the dream of one day starting and running his own company. Now the President and co-founder of Attain, a management, consulting, and IT services company focused on facilitating the ecosystem of innovation throughout the D.C. metropolitan area, it was a dream he transferred to reality. “There are federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health that put billions of dollars a year into medical research, and then you have universities like Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic that are also doing research to find cures,” Manish explains. “There’s an ecosystem between these organizations, but no one to facilitate it. That’s our niche.

Our customers are the top 70 research institutes and the federal government, and our business is streamlining to render more effective the efforts of everyone.”

Attain was registered in January of 2009 by Manish, Greg Baroni, John O’Neill, and Mark Davis, all four of whom had met in 1992 as co-workers at KPMG. In March of 2009, the company BearingPoint, which

was KPMG’s consulting business, filed for bankruptcy.

While Manish had left KPMG before BearingPoint was created, he and his coworkers were heartbroken to see the demise of the hundred-year-old company where they had spent some of their best years and learned so much.

In an effort to help the sinking company, they attained part of BearingPoint’s assets in August of 2009 and put them toward the new company. “We learned over time that this was our chance to really do what we wanted to do,” Manish explains. “With this in mind, in creating a business structure, we focused not on what would make us the most money, but instead on what would allow other people to share in the wealth as well. We wanted everyone involved to be successful. We wanted to build a company that would last so that, when we go, new people can take over and everyone can contribute.”

While Attain is still young, its success is evident through the massive growth it has experienced, employing 250 people and generating $55 million in revenue in just three years. The road to its creation, however, was not as easy as simply dreaming up a great idea as a teenager and waiting for the opportune moment to arise. Throughout his childhood in Bombay, India, Manish was surrounded by successful family members who all owned their own businesses. His father, an engineer, had his own company, as did most of his aunts and uncles. After he attained his bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Pune University in India, his family assumed he would either open his own computer company or, as the only son of three children, take over his father’s business. His father was the only one who saw something different for him. “My dad always told me that, if I wanted to continue his business, it was all mine,” Manish recalls. “However, he wanted me to first and foremost do what I wanted and not feel obligated to follow in his footsteps. If I had a vision, he wanted me to go for it and pursue my passion, and if it didn’t work out, I always had his business to fall back on.”

Manish Agarwal

5

His mother was equally encouraging, pushing him to live his life to his full potential. She had earned a master’s degree—a rare achievement for an Indian woman at that time—yet she had chosen to become a full-time mother and housewife, and was never able to put her degree into practice. “She had thoughts and plans of her own, but she put those aside to help raise us,” Manish recalls. “From her, I learned true patience and persistence.”

After graduation, Manish worked for a year and a half at ICL, an IT firm giant based in the United Kingdom. Before long, however, he could no longer ignore the inner voice that echoed the entrepreneurial ideas that had kept him up so many nights through his youth. The majority of his classmates had gone to the United States for work, and wondered if moving to the U.S. might open the door to opportunities for his own big break. With his parents’ encouragement, Manish moved to Washington, D.C. with $200 in his pocket and nowhere to stay. Following the advice of a friendly bus driver who had taken him into the city, he set up camp in a cheap hotel in Dupont Circle and handdelivered his resume to every business within walking distance. While most businesses refused to even look at his resume, he landed an interview with KPMG that very first day of searching. He was hired immediately, starting in an entry level position the next morning.

“Who knows what would have happened if the bus driver had dropped me off somewhere else?” Manish laughs.

At the age of 28, after only five and a half years, he was made into the youngest partner in the company’s history. It typically takes well over a decade to become a partner in the consulting industry, and while Manish cannot say for sure what set him apart, he credits his energy, intensity, and the passion he harbors his work.

“I didn’t work hard with the objective of becoming a partner, I just enjoyed what I was doing so much, and the ascension was natural,” Manish says. “I was willing to work the assigned eight hours and then another eight hours on top of that. I would go out with my friends in the evening and then go back to the office afterward just to see what was there to be done. It was a lot of hard work, but I had the energy and interest to do it.”

Manish was nominated for partner by his thenmentor, Greg Baroni, who later became a fellow cofounder of Attain. Always willing to help, Greg taught Manish that KPMG was built on the idea that if you wanted to do something, you had to take the initiative to communicate that desire and actually do it. “While I 6

was working on teams, there were a couple of projects where the managers didn’t really do what the client wanted, so I took the initiative to change that,” Manish recalls. “The clients saw that, so when KPMG would bid for more work, the clients wanted me in charge because I had their trust.”

While he was given the responsibility he had rightfully earned, Manish realized his experience was dwarfed by that of the CEOs he was dealing with—a reality he did not shy from, but rather embraced.

“I made sure to always hire people who were more experienced and mature than me,” he affirms. “My first hires were all people who made more than me with more experience and credibility. I knew that was how I could build the best team possible for our clients.”

Becoming a partner taught him to anticipate what was expected and how to align everyone to work towards a common goal, and because of these experiences, Manish credits his time at KPMG as teaching him true leadership. “There are so many thought processes and so many great ideas,” he recalls. “You need everyone going in the same right direction without killing the spirit, and I developed my skills in achieving that kind of streamlined drive while at KPMG.” Despite his many successes with the company, Manish decided to leave in 2001 because he had grown too comfortable in the work and had learned everything the system had to offer. Around that time, he was recruited by Unisys, a company that had sold hardware but was looking to transform into services and offered Manish a new platform for leadership and growth. He was picked to lead the Asia-Pack region, which extended from China to New Zealand. “I thought I knew everything when I left KPMG,” he laughs. “But KPMG was a private company, while Unisys was a public company. When I joined, I learned a great level of discipline. I learned how to run a business like a business and not an individual.” In the seven years he was there, he found every day to be a new challenge as he sought to change the dialogue with clients and drive the quarterly earnings.

While working for Unisys, Manish and his wife lived in Singapore, where they brought their two children into the world. Life was good, with the family living in a large penthouse with ocean-front views paid for by the company. Despite the perks of the job, however, he felt his life was missing something—the company he had always dreamed of creating but had yet to actually build. After seven years running the Asia-Pacific region, he and his family returned to the United States, where he started his first company called

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Visible Info. He put a great deal of his own money into financing the startup, yet it failed to generate income.

Eventually the company was acquired, which freed him to try something new. With that, he and Greg Baroni registered Eclat Consulting, which was then renamed as Attain.

When John O’Neill and Mark Davis joined in the effort, it quickly became obvious that they were a group destined for success. The four men shared decades of history from working together at KPMG, and as a result, enjoyed a deep trust in each other. “They all know what I’ve done in my career,” Manish explains. “They knew my wife before I married her, and we’ve watched each other’s children grow up. We know who did what and what our skeletons are. In business, there’s a lot to agree to, and we can trust each other because we know each other.” Beyond their mutual trust in one another, the group has a natural affinity for anticipating plans for the future pushing toward a common goal. Attain strives to be known as the company that does business as it should be done and takes care of its people, and while it may be small today, Manish anticipates that it will be the main company to beat within twenty years.

While his career has supplied its fair share of challenges and difficult tasks, Manish readily admits that the hardest, and most rewarding of them all, was convincing his wife he was the one for her. “I was so in love with her, as I still am,” he says with smile. “But back then, she wasn’t ready to date, so over two years I had to really work hard to win her over.” Now, he credits her for being his greatest source of support and strength.

His proudest career accomplishment was becoming a partner, which she was involved in as his fiancé. Then, as he struggled over the difficult decision to join Unisys when he still felt so connected to KPMG, she helped

him to look past the business side of the transition to recognize how living in a new country would enrich their lives and teach their family so much about the world. Finally, when he told her he wanted to give up his job to start his own company, she was completely supportive even though they had two small children to care for. “I try to never work weekends so I can totally dedicate myself to my family during that time,” he says.

“When I work during the week, she supports me fully, encouraging our kids to feel proud of my work. It’s great for me to know I have such strong support from my family.”

With the help of his family behind him, Manish is a success not just for his career and personal accomplishments, but for his ability to balance the two.

With that in mind, his advice to young entrepreneurs entering the business world today is a similar sentiment: work hard, but still have fun at the same time. “If what you’re doing isn’t fun for you, you’re doing the wrong thing,” he advises firmly. “Work hard and learn as much as you can. Don’t shy away from your experiences, but instead embrace them and do as much as you can in whatever it may be.”

Equally as important as those learning experiences are the relationships made along the way. His coworkers from KPMG-turned-co-founders of Attain serve as living, breathing examples of the importance of these relationships. “I don’t think one’s personal life and work life are really all that different,” he reasons.

“It all comes together, and for Attain, it’s the culture.”

It’s a culture of collaboration in the spirit of those late evenings conversations he and his friends enjoyed in their youth—the very same culture of collaboration that will keep Attain growing and reaching for success long into the future.

Manish Agarwal

7

Dan Aldridge The Family Man Dan Aldridge walked out of his high school basketball coach’s office, spirits low after delivering the news that he wouldn’t be able to play his sophomore year. It had been a hard choice, but the time required for practices and games was becoming too much with two jobs and his father needing him home. He realized then that the promise he’d show as an all-star club player and in high school would never be realized. His dreams to play college ball were over.

Since his mother’s untimely death to cancer and his father’s ensuing depression over the loss of his wife, Dan had at the age of 16 become the man of the house and breadwinner for the family. “After Mom died, my father collapsed emotionally.

There were times we couldn’t get him to come out of his room, so I took over,” Dan recalls. “I drove my siblings around, bought the groceries, prepared meals, and worked several jobs. It was very tough, and all the things I had done before, like playing basketball and having a social life, went out the window. But I kept our family going. It made me man up. I had to take control and be strong, especially with my younger siblings depending on me.”

Adulthood may have been thrust upon Dan too early, but with the help of his maternal grandfather and second-oldest brother, he was able to carry the family through their hardest time. He became a family man, developing the values, insight, stamina, and compassion that would later make him a successful business leader, able to keep a company afloat through good times and bad as well. “We could have very easily ended up in a shelter,” he notes of his youth. “But we stuck it out.”

Today, Dan is the founder and CEO of Performa Apps, a company that sells enterprise software for manufacturing and, more recently, for the public sector.

“The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software we implement basically runs the nuts and bolts for an entire manufacturing company, from taking sales orders to doing floor planning to handling purchase

and production orders,” he explains. “Lately we’ve been focusing on financials, business intelligence, customer relationship management, and financial budgeting systems.”

The company recently went through a merger, but has kept its mission intact. While Dan has come a long way since the days of counting his pennies in order to afford dinner for his family, he keeps a strong sense of family values at the forefront of his day-to-day thinking. “I started my business with a family-oriented feeling,” he explains. “I was close with the people I hired, and I felt responsible to take care of them as a family. I wanted people with similar values, so that if we faced adversity, such as the downturn in the economy, we could stay strong together.”

Before his mother’s death, Dan and his three younger siblings enjoyed a relatively carefree childhood in Prince Georges County, Maryland. His father had been in the Navy as a petty officer, and his mother was a homemaker. His father retired to help raise the four children, and while they got by on savings and some Social Security benefits, the children had to hold jobs as soon as they were eligible to. Dan’s first job was working a newspaper route around the age of twelve, and he eventually moved on to working in food service by the age of fifteen.

Dan had a close relationship with his parents growing up and took specific values from each of them.

From his father, who always had high standards for his children, he learned that integrity was essential in both business and in life. “He believed in being self-reliant and resilient,” Dan explains. “He would never let us entertain the mindset that the world was against us. If we had problems, he expected us to internalize them and fight for ourselves.” His mother, on the other hand, taught him kindness, which she demonstrated through her avid charity work and attentive care of her family.

Both of his parents routinely stressed the importance of education and hard work in school, and they sent

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Dan to Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a challenging institution with a focus on science and technology.

Even after the responsibility and turmoil that followed his mother’s death, Dan remained devoted to his schoolwork and won a scholarship for college.

He attended the College of William and Mary for undergrad, where he majored in economics. He found he had a deep interest in econometrics, and for one class, he performed a study that predicted the potential success of a baseball team in the Washington area. “It was based on the geography of the city as well as the demographics, and found that it would be a lousy place to have a team,” he laughs. “They would have to have a well-above average record to generate enough ticket sales.” While his paper may have disappointed local baseball players, it impressed the economic analysis firm National Economic Research Associates, and he was hired shortly after graduation.

He worked at N/E/R/A as a programmer analyst for three years, after which he spent a short time working for the Washington Consulting Group doing government contract work. Then, in 1991, he enrolled at George Mason University, where he attained his MBA. While he had been turned off by accounting in undergrad, he devoted himself to understanding the financial side of business in graduate school, leading his class in the subject and acquiring skills that would prove invaluable down the road at Performa Apps.

After finishing his MBA, Dan was hired by Baan International, a Dutch company that at the time was the #2 company in the ERP market behind SAP. He worked there for three years as a consultant until he received a call from a recruiter inviting him to work for FlowServe, Inc., a multi-billion dollar manufacturer of oil pumps. Their office in Los Angeles was looking for independent consultants around the same time that Baan began running into financial trouble. Shortly after Dan accepted the job with FlowServe, Baan was bought out; making him glad he had made the tough call to uproot his wife from their newly-built house in D.C. to move to Huntington Beach in California.

“It really was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he laughs, recalling the fun he and his then-new wife, Liz, had living on the California shore. “They gave me a great contract, and rates were really high back then because they were looking for good people. They gave us a nice salary and a large expense account, so we had a nice life for the three years we were there.” As well as being a positive business experience, Dan and Liz were able to save most of their money since their living expenses were small and they were able to rent 10

out their home in Washington while they were away. It had been a comfortable lifestyle, but when Liz became pregnant with their first son in 2001, she decided it was time they moved home to be closer to their families.

While in California, Dan was essentially working for his own business as an independent consultant, and when he returned back to Washington in 2003, he incorporated the company as i-app Services LLC. “Working for manufacturing companies is what I was born to do,” he says. “I’m a finance guy at heart. I get involved in accounting, but I also like to be out there on the shop floor where things are actually being made.

It’s fascinating to see how they do it.”

The company was solely owned for nearly ten years until 2012, when they decided to go through with a merger. The decision was made in large part because the company had anticipated receiving a large contract with Daimler Benz in the U.S. and Canada. To prepare, they hired several full time employees as well as various independent contractors. As it turned out, however, the project was prematurely canceled when fluctuations of the economy rendered it short of funding. At the same time, the division they were working for was shut down; leaving Dan with an overstaffed company that was bleeding money. “I had no choice but to purge in 2012,” he sighs. “Things in manufacturing had been tough, and I had to let go some employees who were also good friends. I even had to let go of my younger brother, who had worked for me as our Marketing Director. Imagine having to lay off your own brother.”

Before Performa Apps started hitting turbulence, they had worked with an Australian company as a Performa Software reseller. Dan and the CEO of Performa had met at a Channel Partner Conference in Orlando in 2011, where it quickly became clear that Dan and his company had been on their radar for some time. “At that point, he wasn’t interested in acquiring us,” Dan explains. “He wanted us to become a reseller of his software. He was trying to break into the US market, and having a small US-based business would have given Performa the kick it needed.”

He and Dan formed a solid relationship, so when Dan ran into some personal and financial battles in the early part of 2012, his new ally came to his aid. “He knew exactly what was going on,” Dan explains. “He made a proposal to me that they become an investor in Performa Apps, since I needed time to recover and the company wouldn’t survive otherwise.” Fortunately, Dan had been hoping for such an offer, since it provided security for the company and allowed Dan to have a salary he could depend on. In July of 2012, the

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

two companies merged, just in time to land a gigantic deal and completely turn the fortune of the company around.

Through the ebb, flow, and ultimate wave of his success, Dan has always been a family man, making it his life’s mission to look out for those who depend on him.

Even though his company is no longer independent, he looks back on the merger with relief; thankful for the stability it lent him and his staff. “Performa gave me a CFO and relieved me of having to do the company finances, which did wonders for my stress level,” he remarks. “Now, generally speaking, Performa lets me do my thing and run my business the way I know how to. It also allows me to have just shy of equal shareholding in the company, so I still have a good sized stake if we sell the company down the line.”

Now that the dust has settled, Dan looks back feeling most proud that he stuck with his business despite its near collapse. “Having my own business has always been my dream,” he says. “I hope I can be remembered for having built a company that people are proud to work for. It doesn’t have to be big, just as long as it has a great reputation and is built around people who love it and share in our culture and values.”

Being a family man, as well, means honoring those that have passed just as much as he works to honor the future. Dan pays this homage through giving back.

Keeping the memory of his mother alive, he actively gives to charities for the homeless, and has made a family tradition out of taking his two sons to assist organizations like Helping Hungry Kids provide meals for lower income families.

When advising young people entering the business world today, Dan emphasizes the importance of gaining unparalleled expertise at every step of one’s academic and professional path. “Learn all you can about accounting, finance and entrepreneurship in school and in your jobs after college,” he says. “These skills will prepare you for having your own business if you choose

to later in your career.”

Timing also figures into his advice. “If you do your own thing right away, there’s a lot of risk,” he explains.

“There’s security in working for a larger company, and it teaches you the ropes. When and if you do opt for the entrepreneurship route, the most important thing is hiring the best people, and to then delegate and clear their path to success. By all means, hire an excellent CFO and accountant. You don’t want to do the finances yourself. Instead, you want to focus on your business. If you have a dream, you should go for it. Just strive to go after it in a smart way.”

Being smart in business also means supplementing real-world experience with extensive reading to stay knowledgeable in one’s field. Dan, for instance, keeps abreast of the news by reading the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Fast Company, Inc., Forbes, Mashable, and the Huffington Post, as well as monitoring social media sources like LinkedIn Today.

From his journey to this point, Dan has cultivated a leadership style centered upon leading by example.

“I take great care in hiring great people that are as passionate about enterprise software and manufacturing as I am,” he explains. “I delegate responsibility and set dates for completion of tasks, but I largely leave the ‘how’ up to them. I’m not a clock-watcher. My employees can work whenever or however they choose as long as they achieve their goals, which I think lowers stress and allows them to perform at a high level.”

With this in mind, Dan leads his business through actions and example, just like he led his family in the wake of tragedy back when he was sixteen years old.

“I’m a hard worker, and I just do the job that needs to be done,” he says. “Losing Mom was hard, but it made me stronger in the end. I know some people might have taken the exact opposite path, but we pulled together and waded our way through. In many ways, that’s how we kept our business afloat. You just have to stick it out, and eventually the storm passes.”

Dan Aldridge

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Francisca Villarroel Alonso Building Something Better Francisca Villarroel Alonso was born in Chile to a Bolivian father and German mother. Her father studied architecture and her mother industrial design, and at the time of her birth, her father was a successful designer working with a department store in Santiago.

Due to the political and economic turmoil in the country, however, demand for expensive construction projects had diminished substantially, and so he found work where he could utilize his design skills: in high fashion.

Despite his success, Francisca’s father decided to move the family to Spain when she was six years old. Although she was young, she remembers how the relocation took her mother by surprise.

“We had a brand new house that my father had designed,” Francisca recounts today.

“Everything was perfect from my mother’s point of view. My father had a job and a great partner. But he wasn’t doing what he was passionate about, so we left everything behind to build something better.”

At the time, Francisca herself didn’t understand her father’s choice, but looking back, she not only understands his desire to pursue his passion—now, she cites it as a formative lesson that has shaped her own philosophy over the years. In Spain, he began again at the very bottom, but over time, he attained a level of success he hadn’t dreamt of in Chile: instead of designing clothes, he was designing resorts.

“He had nothing, then he had plenty, then he had nothing again,” Francisca muses. “He became successful again because he made the choice to follow his passion, and not to settle. Looking back, that set the tone for me.

He did it four or five times throughout his life, and I picked up the pattern—if it’s not working, take it apart, reconfigure it, and redirect yourself. Don’t stay doing something if it’s not making a difference.” Now the cofounder and co-owner of AV Architects & Builders, which renovates homes to fit the tastes, personality, and lifestyle of its clients, Francisca’s business is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of vigilantly reassessing and redirecting her own path in accordance

with her passion.

The first such redirection came during college. She and her three siblings all came to the United States to study at George Mason University, which was the school closest to her paternal aunt’s house in Northern Virginia. As she left Spain, she warned her father that she had no interest in architecture—she planned, instead, to study law and become a lawyer.

After two years at George Mason exploring various disciplines, Francisca and her sister both signed up for an elective course called “Thinking on the Right Side of the Brain.” The girls were shocked when the professor, noting their clear passion for the subject, advised them to consider architecture as a career. After that semester, Francisca and her sister, Antonia, both transferred to Catholic University and enrolled in the architecture program there. Although the program required five more years of study, she didn’t let this deter her. She completed the additional years, and along the way met her husband, Tony, who had transferred into the program from James Madison University.

After graduating in 1992, Francisca found herself concerned about the job market and, thinking she wouldn’t find employment for quite some time, enrolled in an additional class for the fall semester. It was the early 1990’s, and architectural software programs weren’t part of schools’ core curriculum yet, so she sought out this separate class on the use of an AutoCAD program. Just after the semester began, however, she landed a good job with a respected architectural firm in Fairfax, Virginia, called Dewberry & Davis. When the firm learned she was enrolled in AutoCAD classes, they were quick to move her away from the drawing tables and onto the computer; they were short of employees well versed in the technology, and although she had only just been introduced to it, she learned quickly. She stayed with Dewberry & Davis for three years until, in 1995; she again decided to redirect herself.

Francisca had enjoyed her time with the large firm and learned a lot, but felt that the size of the business Francisca Villarroel Alonso

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kept her skills from being fully utilized. The position was comfortable, but no longer the challenge she craved. “I wanted to be a little more hands on, and I was just a peon there,” she explains. “It’s a really large firm—a great organization, but I was just one of many there. I wanted to have more of an impact.”

With that vision, Francisca went looking for something different and found a small firm in need of her skill set. They were three men in their 40s and 50s running their own operation, and none of them were versed in AutoCAD. “I basically applied by telling them, I could be your AutoCAD department,” she remembers.

“They were all more old school, but highly experienced and great people.”

In that capacity, Francisca, one of only four architects, flourished and learned over the next few years. When her son Lucas was born, she never missed a beat, and her bosses, happy with her work and eager to keep her on, told her to bring her infant son into the office.

For almost a year, she brought Lucas into work, until he began toddling around. Then she and Tony faced a decision: should they have more children, or put Lucas in daycare? They decided to have another baby, and Francisca left the job to stay home for a few years. Over the next five years, Francisca had three more children and then decided it was time for her to get back to work. Thus, with four young kids at home, she launched a private business with her husband, and AV Architects & Builders was born.

What began as a small idea has grown significantly since its inception. At first, Francisca and Tony only designed the renovations, but today they oversee the building process as well. The company currently boasts 18 employees and contractors, and takes on anywhere from 4 to 12 renovation projects in a year, depending on the projects’ size. “When I told people I was starting this business, they looked at me like I was crazy,” Francisca laughs. “It seemed like the worst possible time, with all these babies everywhere! But looking back, I’m so glad I didn’t listen to anybody, because in those first five years, the wind just propelled us.”

Although she had only worked on commercial projects in the past, Francisca knew she could put her skills to good use remodeling homes, especially given the requests she periodically received from friends and acquaintances. “People were coming to me and saying, ‘I really want to renovate, when are you going to start a business or something?’” she recalls. “Two people in particular said, ‘I really want to build this addition, but I can’t trust anyone else, and I know you’re going to do a great job.’ So I had two clients before I even started the 14

business!” AV Architects & Builders’ reputation spread through word of mouth, and after those two projects, more followed.

Founding a business allowed Francisca to determine her own hours, often working late into the night and always making time for her children. While this enables her to spend more time with her family while also achieving a success she is proud of, she finds her greatest challenge to be prioritizing her many duties and roles. “Every day you’re faced with ten things that need to get done,” she says. “Every day you have to decide which one of those ten you is going to tackle first, and you have to face the fact that you cannot do them all. People talk about work-life balance, but I think that’s the wrong term. It’s really not a balance, but a whole integration. The hardest thing is to integrate the two worlds successfully.” Like her father before her, she was able to tailor her life to her dreams, leaving a secure position in order to raise children and then finding a way to go back to work without compromising her commitment to her family.

When her father passed away in 2010, Francisca found herself shaken, and with a newfound sense of urgency.

“We really went through and thought about what we wanted to achieve in life,” she avows. “My father’s death gave me a real sense of having a deadline, so I wanted to focus and really get things done.” Although she can no longer turn to her father for advice, his memory still burns brightly in her leadership and life philosophies, and she still has more than her fair share of mentors to rely on. Her three siblings are architects as well, and they all work for the business her father built in Spain, designing luxury resorts and houses. She considers them important influences, along with Tony, who also serves as an architect for the General Services Administration.

Francisca also belongs to The American Institute of Architects, National Association of Women Business Owners, National Association of Professional Women, Accelerator Program of Entrepreneurs’ Organization and several local chamber organizations, and believes that maintaining that outside input is crucial to success.

Having a positive impact on the community is also one of the driving motivations behind Francisca’s work, and when she and her team renovate homes, they take great strides to ensure that nothing goes to waste. AV Architects & Builders work with Habitat for Humanity, donating old building materials to the organization.

“We take entire kitchens and give them to Habitat for Humanity,” she explains. “I love working with them because I know they put everything to good use.” Once, a client suggested that their old kitchen be installed

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

in the teachers’ lounge in a local public school—an idea Francisca was happy to execute. Francisca has also expanded the positive impact of AV Architects & Builders by speaking at the Northern Virginia Women’s Business Conference, hoping to inspire other moms and entrepreneurs to expand their own impacts and strive to build something better themselves.

Francisca followed her father’s example as she found her place in the world, and she advises young people graduating today to do the same. “Find a way to make a difference and pursue a passion,” she urges. She also emphasizes hard work and consistency while also

reminding young people to focus on the journey, rather than worrying over the destination. “Every day counts,” she says her words rife with inspiration. “Don’t look so much at your finish line. Look at what you’re doing today. Today matters just as much as tomorrow. For my dad, every day was the day.” In a sense, Francisca approaches each day with the creative and proactive eye of an architect, not waiting for a better situation to come, but instead creating it herself. By tearing down the old and building something better, she and the AV team are working toward a stronger tomorrow, one project—and one day—at a time.

Francisca Villarroel Alonso

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Murtaza Amil All Your Heart and Both Your Hands Getting good grades, earning admission to the best schools, and preparing for a career were the top priorities in the childhood home that young Murtaza Amil shared with his two older sisters and grandmother in Nagpur, India. His father, a radiologist, and mother, a schoolteacher, were both adamant that his time and energy stay directed toward school. “Especially from tenth to twelfth grade,” he remembers, “if we let our attention drift elsewhere, our parents would say, ‘Just focus on good grades! You need to get into a good school because that’s what’s required to pay the bills.’” So Murtaza threw himself into his studies with all his heart and both his hands.

Yet from an early age, he began showing interest in something else that could pay the bills—entrepreneurship. As a young child, he asked his mother to bake cupcakes for him to sell at school. “Of course she poo-poo’d that idea!” he laughs.

“That doesn’t work in Indian culture, the son of a doctor selling cupcakes in school.

She was worried about what people would say.” Putting his cupcake business dreams aside, Murtaza attended to his work, excelled in high school through his chosen course load of science and math classes, and in 1991 entered BITS Pilani, a prominent Indian university, to pursue a degree in chemical engineering.

It was there that he first began considering entrepreneurship in earnest. Along with several other students, Murtaza wanted to open a chemical factory in India. “One of my colleagues was a landlord in India and had acres and acres of land, where he grew rice,” he explains. “You can make rice oil from rice, so we partnered and set up a plan to produce it.”

Murtaza credits the school with a positive atmosphere that boosted his confidence in his ability to excel in business. “That environment actually shaped my thought process, giving me the feeling that I could actually dream big and achieve big.” He was still a year from graduation, but the plan moved along well until Murtaza went home for the summer, where his father

had something else in mind. “He told me that it was his dream for his son to be educated in the U.S.,” Murtaza remembers. “He wanted me to go to the United States and earn my graduate degree there.” This time, it was rice oil dreams instead of cupcake dreams that he set aside, gaining admission to the University of Arizona— Tempe.

Although he’d been admitted to pursue chemical engineering, Murtaza found himself intrigued by the world of technology. “Those were the big years for IT—’96, ’97—and I said, you know what?

This IT stuff seems very interesting, so I’ll try it,” says Murtaza. “I took a couple of courses there at Arizona, and I did very well. It seemed to come very easily to me.”

After a semester in that capacity, he transferred to George Mason University to be closer to his sister in Fairfax, Virginia.

He graduated in 1998 with a Masters in Information Systems and an offer from Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in their consulting division. Before accepting the offer, however, Murtaza again considered starting his own business. “Those entrepreneurial instincts were very much bubbling up,” he recalls of his feelings at the time. He had become close friends with a successful businessman, Atul Jain, who had launched engineering and IT consulting company called TEOCO, and one day, he and four other students approached him with a proposal.

“We said we didn’t want to work for an existing company and instead wanted to start our own, but we didn’t know how to market ourselves,” Murtaza details.

“We didn’t know how to get a project, so we proposed that he contract a project out to us.” Though Atul didn’t have a project at the time that could be contracted out as proposed, he generously offered them positions at TEOCO instead, but all five students already had lucrative job offers from big brands. “We decided that, if we were going to become employees, we might as well get those big names on our resumes,” Murtaza recalls.

For the third time in his young life, entrepreneurship

Murtaza Amil

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was put on hold.

Atul and Murtaza’s paths would cross again soon, however. In 2002, Atul acquired Respond.com, a technology company created in the late 1990s during the dot com bubble. “In those days, you searched for a business by picking up a huge volume of the Yellow Pages, which was published by large telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Southwestern Bell,” Murtaza explains. “Respond.com was built as a way for these publishers to take this book and, leveraging their presence in the market, power the technology and create something online.” The two businessmen reconnected in 2003, and Murtaza joined Respond as an account manager and analyst.

Today, Respond has transformed significantly, and as its CEO, Murtaza has transformed along with it.

“We aren’t so much a technology provider anymore,” he affirms. “We’re an online lead generation service that helps consumers find quality local business, and vice versa. We have advertisers, and we sell our leads to those advertisers.” In other words, small businesses and independent contractors from an array of fields— everything from the wedding industry to Lasik eye surgeons—use the site to acquire new clients. Murtaza and his team have developed a niche-specific series of sites that fall under the Respond umbrella, including leadingcontractors.com for those interested in home improvements, bridesandgrooms.com for those interested in weddings, and pestexpert.com for those in need of pest control.

Respond’s main focus today, however, is financial planners and advisors, who they serve through a site called wiseradvisor.com. “That site receives our undivided attention,” Murtaza avows. “Everything else exists by inertia. Because we’re very pragmatic about the way we run our business, we have to run business profitably, and we aren’t venture-funded anymore.

We cannot take revenue off the table and we cannot neglect the margins, recognizing how important it is to take care of overheads and keep growing in our focus area of financial planning.”

The reasons for this focus are three-fold. “One is that there’s a huge unmet demand in this area,” Murtaza details. “One thing financial advisors struggle most with is client acquisition, and that’s exactly the problem our services solve. The second reason for this focus is that financial advisors have a willingness to pay for this kind of service—much higher than, say, a wedding photographer or a DJ. And lastly, in terms of competition, we felt we had a huge head start in this industry. Even though we’re small, we are the largest 18

independent network of financial advisors, and we have the largest network and affiliates with which to bring in users and investors to generate leads and match those leads with financial advisors. So, competitively speaking, we are very well positioned.”

Murtaza and his team weren’t handed that position, however. When he first came on board, he worked his way up over the course of eight years, serving as Director of Sales, Director of Business Development, and Director of Marketing at various times. “I tried everything there,” Murtaza laughs. “Atul was comfortable throwing me any challenge that came his way.” In 2007, when Respond was still a business unit under TEOCO, Murtaza volunteered to go to India and help set up business offices there. “Within six to eight months of starting the India offices, I slowly moved away from Respond and assumed the role of a telecom associate for TEOCO only,” he recalls. “I was somewhat disassociated from Respond and remained in India for three years before returning to the U.S. in 2010 to pursue my MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.” At that time, Murtaza rekindled his connection with Respond, which was now independent from TEOCO. In 2011, he was named its CEO, and in early 2012, he finished his MBA. Today, at the helm of Respond, Murtaza’s entrepreneurial dreams are realized, but not satiated.

Rather, assuming leadership of the $3 million company has only fueled his ambition to push the envelope further and pursue continued growth. When considering what he’ll want as a legacy at the end of a long career, he sees a bright future for the business- “When it comes to Respond, I want to continue taking it places,” he remarks. “I see a bright future for this business, and I want to make it a $100, $200, or even $500 million company. To me, that would be huge. I would feel that I’d made a big difference. When we have advisors say, ‘Yes, I built my practice using wiseradvisor.com,’ that gives me immense joy.”

But Murtaza is quick to point out that business is only one aspect of a meaningful, balanced life. His wife of 11 years and their children are a constant source of support and happiness for him, and when he talks about the future, success in his family and personal life are just as important as success at Respond.

“Making sure my family is strong, happy, and healthy is extremely important to me,” he say. “When I look back on my life, I want to know that I spent quality time with my kids, brought them up right, and had a positive influence on them as people. And honestly, I have to say that my success over the past few years

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

would have been impossible without my wife. She has made sacrifices, and that frees me up to be much more aggressive and entrepreneurial. In fact, for two years, I was doing full-time MBA coursework and full-time Respond work, which took a huge toll on my family in terms of the time I could spend with them. My wife has been very supportive of my effort and my dreams, and she has been an equal partner in the dreams that we have for our family.”

Along with the tremendous support of his wife and Atul, two other mentors made a profound difference in Murtaza’s professional journey. The first, Gonzalo Verdugo, was a partner at CSC. “He brought me into the management consulting practice at CSC in 1999,” Murtaza explains. “Usually you needed to have an MBA from a big name school to work in that capacity, but I didn’t, so I worked with Gonzalo on a project with USPS and he really liked me. I was able to impress him, so he introduced me to the strategic services arm of CSC, and that’s how I got into management consulting.

That was one person who really believed in me and encouraged me throughout.”

Ed Susman, another partner and mentor at CSC, worked with Murtaza for two years on a project with JP Morgan Chase. “I learned so much from Ed on that project, from how you deal with clients, to how you write to clients, to how to tell a story,” he remembers.

“So many of the things that I would say a polished professional needs to have, I learned from him. He’s another person who believed in me, encouraged me, and supported me.”

When asked how he’d advise young people entering the business world today, perhaps with entrepreneurial dreams of their own, Murtaza has three pieces of wisdom to impart. “One is, whatever you do, do it with all your heart and both your hands,” he urges. “It

doesn’t matter what it is. If your first job requires you to paint the walls, do a phenomenal job painting the walls. Don’t even think about the fact that you didn’t go to college to paint the walls. You made the choice and you took the job, and because you’ve taken that job, put your heart into it. It will reflect in your output, no question.

“The second piece of advice,” he continues, “is that, as you grow, it’s very important to step outside of your comfort zone. If you want to grow, try different things, because that expands your comfort zone. Make that your habit. If you remain contented and just doing things that you’re already good at, you will not grow.

Rather, you’ll become confined to the same set of skills.

And finally, believe in people. As you evolve and deal with people more often, it becomes a two-way street.

When you believe in people, they believe in you, and that is very powerful.”

If he ever had any doubt in the power of belief, it was dispelled by the greatest professional challenge of his career—going to India to set up TEOCO’s first office in the country. “It was a much smaller company then, probably between $20 and $25 million,” he reflects.

“Nobody in India knew about TEOCO at that time, and I had to recruit a team from scratch. So I set up shop with my laptop, taking meetings with people, trying to communicate to them what I had to offer and trying to convince them why they should come to me. I couldn’t offer people 50 percent raises. In fact, I couldn’t even offer them 20 percent raises. The only thing I could give them was hope. All I could do was to build a dream for them.” By using all his heart, both his hands, and an inner conviction that led him far, far outside the bounds of his comfort zone to build that dream, the construction was a success, and today, for Murtaza, success in business is the dream that came true.

Murtaza Amil

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Christopher Archer Wise Risks A fellow classmate stepped in front of Chris Archer as he walked to class at Howard University and handed him a flyer. “I’m having a huge party,” his classmate told him.

“I want you to come. Spread the word.”

Chris thanked him and headed off to his marketing class. He recognized that classmate, not just because he was making a name for himself in promoting parties around campus, but because he had the same approach to life as Chris had: that with hard work, and careful observation, he just might be the one to grab a great and elusive opportunity. Even at such a young age, Chris had seized the nearly impossible opportunity of going to the prestigious school of Howard University, when so many of his equally bright and talented peers in the rougher parts of Brooklyn had somehow lost their way.

Today, Chris is the president and founder of Radius Technology Group, a government contracting company focused on IT security and computer program management. He started the company after years of careful planning, observation, and waiting for the right moment to arise. He is often asked how he achieved his great success at such a young age, to which he recounts the story of his fliergiving classmate, who is now known to the world as Sean “Puffy” Combs, an entrepreneurial powerhouse in the music industry. “He was one of the hardest working guys I’ve ever seen, and he truly earned his success,” Chris explains. “You can’t be the boss overnight. A lot of work goes into perfecting your craft, no matter how talented you are. I’m somewhat conservative in my day-to-day life, but I saw that you have to take some wise risks to achieve a reward, so I observed, began recognizing trends, and learned how to make calculated risks.”

Chris started Radius in response to his realization that there was a strong need within the federal government to enhance IT security. “Our goal is to help our clients secure the enterprise by making it more functionally useful in achieving their mission,” Chris explains. “Sometimes, security can inhibit an organization’s mission, so we try to make it an enabler instead.” Radius makes this possible by focusing on re-educating the people running these

IT systems to ensure they are using their equipment to its full capacity. “Once you get the people on board, the technology takes care of itself,” he affirms. “There’s almost always a solution, so it’s more a matter of getting people aware of how to use their IT efficiently.” While Radius primarily works on IT security, it has recently branched out into physical security as well, instituting services that protect the physical space, like ensuring outsiders can’t eavesdrop in certain areas. The company has contracts all around the world helping the Department of Justice secure the sites they work at.

Radius was launched in October of 2001 and landed its first contract in June of 2002.

Chris had been working at KPMG leading audit teams into various government agencies when he saw the need to make IT enterprise more secure. “We were finding so many holes in their security apparatus,” Chris recalls. “As the new FISMA law came into being, government agencies were scrambling to comply, so I had the opportunity to bid on a contract that was completely unrelated to what I was doing at KPMG.” The bid was successful, and Radius Technology Group came into being. With six employees working on the contract, Chris realized it was time to leave KPMG to fully devote himself to Radius.

Although competition for government contracts has grown as a result of budget cuts, Radius has never had a problem attaining financing, partially due to their unique skill set of blending physical and IT security. “We’ve used the growing competition to better ourselves,” he notes. “We’ve looked at it not as a problem, but as an opportunity. Security has become more of a commodity across IT, and everyone says they’re doing it, so it forces us to dig deeper within our niche, get better, and find innovative ways to apply what we do to other aspects of our field.”

Chris may tend to lean toward risk-aversion, but his success in business results from taking calculated leaps of faith at opportune moments. This sense of balance surfaced early on in his personality, enhanced during his childhood growing up in Brooklyn, NY. “The city was Christopher Archer

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much more segregated during my era than it is now,” he notes. “If you went up two blocks, you were in a really nice neighborhood, but down two blocks, it was really rough.”

While his neighborhood may have been choppy and inconsistent, his family served as the stable foundation in his young life. While his upbringing was a combined effort of the whole family, his grandmother proved to be the matriarch and the true grounding influence in his young life. “The number of people I truly look up to can be counted on one hand, and she’s among them,” Chris smiles.

His grandmother was born and raised in Trinidad, where she worked at a beauty parlor to save money. Like many other immigrants, she saw America as a means for a better life for her and her family, so she came over in the 60’s, bringing her children over shortly after. “She came with a certain determination and a fire in her belly,” Chris recounts. “Her back was against the wall, so she made it happen.” She worked her way up through various jobs before settling as a nurse’s assistant, and while she never made more than twenty-two thousand dollars a year, she has always been a master at managing her money, so that now, at the age of eighty-eight, she has the family house in Brooklyn as well as a house in Trinidad, which she travels too yearly. “She always told us to buy what you need, not what you want,” he recalls. “She was the rock of the family. She didn’t say much, but she led by the way she operated. I try and set that same example for my kids.”

Chris’s mother had him when she was a teenager, and because his father did not stick around to help, his aunts and grandmother stepped in. His grandmother owned a four-story apartment building where Chris and his mother rented an apartment, as did his aunt. Because the family was together and all made an effort to pitch in, his mother was able to finish school and work to contribute to the family expenses. Chris was the only child until his brother was born sixteen years later, followed after by his cousin, so during his childhood, his grandmother made a point to work while Chris was at school so she could be home when he was. “She would always be home at a certain time,” he notes. “That constancy was very comforting, especially given how inconsistent most other things were.”

While Chris’s family surrounded him with stability and support, many of the kids he grew up with were less positively influenced, and thus got caught up in the darker side of Brooklyn. “There’s often misconceptions that people in rougher areas are less well-off because they are lazy, but that’s really not true,” he stresses. “Most often, these people have responsibilities that are greater than their means are, so it leaves their kids to their own 22

devices. What happens is that these working class people are at their job all day and every day, so they aren’t always able to be there for their kids and give them that stability my grandmother gave me. That allows for a certain element of drugs, stealing, and gang activity to occur.

There’s a lot of pressure, and I’ve seen it eat up people who were much smarter and more talented than me.”

The unfortunate trend Chris saw became most apparent as he progressed through high school. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, a prestigious establishment focused on engineering. He did well throughout elementary and middle school, with dreams of becoming an aeronautical engineer, however upon entering high school, he began noticing the many temptations the city had to offer. Skipping class slowly became popular, with drugs and alcohol surfacing among some of the school’s brightest students. Chris, however, was hesitant to join his classmates in their rebellious behavior, mostly because of his natural tendency to avoid risk. “I straddled both grounds,” he confesses. “I skipped class a few times, and my grades slipped, but once I saw kids getting kicked out, I realized that making it through high school was my only ticket out. According to that line of thinking, the biggest risk I could have taken was following my peers, and not focusing on my studies. I may have veered out of line now and then, but never so much so that I didn’t get my homework done.”

Aside from his sheer talent, Chris understood that staying focused on school would allow him to move up in the world—a notion that easily served as strong source of motivation. At the age of fourteen, he landed his first job as a bike messenger, which allowed him to see all sides of the city, from the corporate lawyers and Wall Street bankers to the sandwich makers at the corner store. “I loved the hustle,” he gushes. “It allowed me to see a lot of people working in all areas, which gave me the confidence that I could get to that top level too.”

After graduating high school, he attended Howard University in Washington, DC. He originally had no desire to attend college outside of the city; however his mother saw the giant opportunity he would have in attending the country’s top African-American school.

Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of his life, since he was able to see the world outside of New York City and join the ranks of other driven and talented young people.

For most of his time in school, he was unsure about which career path he wanted to pursue, so he chose to major in Marketing. “My roommates were very determined and focused,” he recalls. “I took the hint from them decided that while I may not know what I wanted

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

to do, I had to do something, and I had to do it well, so I chose to learn about something I could use out in the world.” He realized he loved marketing, not so much for the sales aspects of the major, but because he was able to learn about human behavior and interaction.

After graduating in 1991, Chris worked in the Department of Energy for several months before being hired to work as a data base administrator with a government contractor for five years. During that time, he was promoted to be project manager of a contract, but realized when his wife became pregnant that he needed to make more money to support his growing family. Fortunately, he was hired by Coca Cola as the Mid-Atlantic Region’s Inventory/Cost manager. In that capacity, he oversaw costs, financials, and inventory, which gave him a valuable lesson in supply chain management and accounting. A few years later, the company asked him to be on the team that implemented SAP business solutions software, so Chris, his wife, and their one-year-old son hit the road, working in major cities around the country for three months at a time. “We were able to see the country on someone else’s dime,” he says. “And I got a great education on IT and computers at the same time.”

After three years with Coca Cola, Chris’s wife became pregnant with their second child, which once again prompted him to look for an even better job. He was quickly hired by KPMG to do IT auditing in their DC practice, where he worked with a small, loyal team. He remained with the company for another three years, but when talk began to surface of him being promoted to manager, he began to rethink his options. “I never had the desire to get into high-level management at KPMG because I saw the pressures they put on you to make the numbers,” he recalls. Until that point, he had been working comfortably with a small, loyal team on reoccurring jobs, and when he realized that a promotion would mean he was responsible for finding new sources of revenue, he lost his desire to move forward. “I’ve been doing various things on the side since I was a teenager, but I was waiting for the right opportunity to arise to really dig into that,” he recalls.

The opportunity came in an unexpected form, when Chris realized a friendly acquaintance had a professional need that he had the ability to fulfill. From his previous jobs, he had acquired a diverse skill set in technical training, IT, auditing, and finanvcials, and he had noticed that many government agencies had holes in their IT security systems. The insight and skills he had picked up had accumulated into a powerful opportunity he could

not help but jump on.

“I don’t like to make a move until I have to, but I had set things up in such a way that it seemed more risky to continue doing what I was doing rather than take the leap,” he recalls. “It wasn’t planned, but all those experiences helped me easily transition into government contracting.” As a result, he signed Radius’ first contract with this acquaintance in 2002, and rather than taking out loans, had a few friends invest in his plan, and with a team of six dedicated people, Chris got to work. Now, ten years later, Radius is a thriving organization that employs thirty people and hopes to expand ten-fold in the near future.

Looking back, Chris feels he relied too heavily on his talent for too long. Success came easily to the company for its first five years, and while he was doing the foundational pieces correctly, it was not until recently that he could say with confidence he was working the business to its full potential. One such example is that he recently hired a visionary specialist to help formulate more creative IT solutions and hopefully give the company a greater edge in the market.

Since beginning Radius, Chris has learned that the most essential piece in leadership is empowering people and trusting them to do their work well. “I don’t believe in micromanaging, but I do know that you have to recognize critical points where you need to step in,” he explains. “I look at all my relationships as a partnership, where we make an exchange. This is what I have to offer you, and this is what you have to offer me. If we agree, then you go do your thing and come to me if you need help.” He hopes that at the end of the day, his style of leadership will allow his employees and clients to feel glad they took a shot on him, and that they learned something from their joint experience.

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world, he emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible. “There’s a lot of value in working for someone else,” he notes. “You get an education on whatever business you’re working at, and you get paid for it. I believe you increase your chances of success by figuring out what you might like to do, see who is doing it well, and go work for them. It doesn’t matter if you’re pushing a mail cart or running to get lunch, because you’re exposing yourself to the industry you want to be in.” Beyond that, his story is a testament to biding one’s time, waiting for the right moment to arise so the only direction to move is up. After all, to an entrepreneur, wise risks are not really risks at all; they’re a way of life, and a road to success.

Christopher Archer

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Ethan Assal Take the Baton and Run Ethan Assal wasn’t necessarily the fastest runner on his high school track team, but he had something else— vision.

That vision translated into strategy, commitment, and leadership. It’s a vision that took a group of moderately talented young men who, individually, wouldn’t have been able to achieve athletic excellence, and taught them how to perfect the handoff of a baton that occurs in relay races. It’s a vision that allowed that group of young men to work together and win several state championships, going on to finish second on the east coast in the Junior Olympics in the 400-meter relay. “I wasn’t the fastest runner, but I was the glue,” Ethan remembers. “I helped the team pull together and work technically, showing that we could still have excellent results with the talent we were given. We had it down to a science, and we were very successful.”

Now the founder, chairman and CEO of Verasolve, a marketing, public relations, and branding firm focused on Building Stakeholder Value™, Ethan’s aptitude for utilizing the best parts of a group to achieve remarkable results has only improved since the days he spent running relay races.

Verasolve is the solution to a variety of challenges Ethan has encountered over his years in business. From 1989 to 2001, he built and ran Multi-Media Holdings, Inc. (MHI), the largest advertising agency in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. MHI achieved its size through organic growth and through the acquisition of more than 20 smaller companies. With $400 million in capitalized billings, 400 employees in D.C., and another 200 staff spread between Atlanta and Boston, its success was certainly remarkable. But Ethan found himself frustrated that the company’s size made it hard to deliver the personalized service he felt its clients deserved. “With that many employees and that much overhead, you have to feed the machine,” he remarks. “I was responsible for going out and bringing the work in, without necessarily doing the work I really enjoyed. Everything wasn’t as aligned as it could have been.”

Indeed, MHI allocated a third of its costs to labor and over half to overhead and the cost of sales. Thus, when

Ethan founded Verasolve, he took a more virtual approach that has allowed the company to cut out overhead costs altogether, allocating instead approximately 80 percent of its costs to labor. “This means our clients get 2 to 2.5 times the labor at no extra cost to them,” Ethan explains.

Another Verasolve differentiator is the length of its client contracts. Most advertising or PR agencies typically sign client contracts for a minimum of six months, resulting in a concentration of work at the beginning and end of the period with intervening months of scant activity. To keep its team in synch with clients’ needs, Verasolve instead signs openended engagement agreements that can be terminated with two weeks’ notice. “This helps ensure our team is actively engaged with our clients, focused on meeting their goals and needs,” he explains. “If we do not deliver valuable, useful services that have a measurable return on investment for the clients, they can—and should— let us go. It keeps us highly involved and interactive with them. Verasolve is aimed at building stakeholder value—meaningful benefits that extend to its clients’ vendors, employees, and customers.”

Verasolve was launched as a consulting business in 2003 and was formally named in 2005. Today, it works primarily with business-to-business and businessto-government clients, predominantly in financial services, government contracting, professional services, and business oriented around commercial real estate.

Verasolve’s target demographic is companies that would benefit from having a VP of Marketing, but that do not necessarily want the expense of having one. While these companies tend to have more than ten employees and less than a couple hundred, substantially larger companies have also utilized Verasolve’s public relations expertise. Whether clients are looking to expand brand recognition, find more qualified prospects, or increase closing ratios, the efforts of Ethan and his team translate into tangible, meaningful results—more prospects and significantly higher percentages of deals closed.

Ethan began learning the science and art of good business as a boy. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, Ethan Assal

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shortly after his mother, a teacher, returned from Israel, where she met his father. His father grew up in Tunisia, but fled to Israel when war broke out in 1948. There, he found work as a farmer, but knew no English and had not finished high school. Once he arrived in the U.S., Ethan’s father earned his high school equivalent, eventually becoming the first person in his family to attend college.

He went on to a career as a successful electrical engineer.

“When I was young, I remember my father studying all the time, going through college while simultaneously learning English,” Ethan reminisces. “This taught me at a young age what could be accomplished through hard work, strong focus, and a desire to make a better life for your family.”

When the young family moved to the D.C. metropolitan area, Ethan would shovel snow from walkways and cut lawns to earn money. And just as he never cut corners in his work, his parents made sure he did not cut corners on the balance sheet either. Ethan had to purchase his own shovels for the walkways and gas for the lawnmower, which taught him the importance of running a profitable business that covered its own costs.

These early lessons in business combined with another defining moment in Ethan’s childhood to help chart his course along the path of entrepreneurship. In 1972, an elementary school class project assigned students a historical presidential candidate for whom they had to organize a mock campaign. Ethan was assigned George Wallace. “Each student received buttons and bumper stickers from the various campaigns, and I began to collect political memorabilia—a hobby that continued for the next seven years,” he remembers.

In 1977, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, Ethan purchased a stock of inauguration buttons wholesale and then organized a group of classmates to sell them at the event, earning several thousand dollars. At subsequent inaugurations, that team grew to more than 100 people, each of whom would keep a percentage of the revenues.

Ethan would rent a hotel suite on Pennsylvania Avenue, which was used as an operations base where he could manage the supplies and cash.

Ethan graduated from high school in 1979 and went on to attend college at Brandeis University. In 1980, while at a political memorabilia trading convention, a friend mentioned to Ethan in passing that rock and roll buttons would be the wave of the future. “Something in my mind clicked, and I knew I wanted to ride that wave,” he recalls.

Ethan began researching the industry, learning how rock and roll buttons were made and where they were being sold. Using this knowledge and leveraging his experience selling political buttons, he began running a music merchandising business out of his college dorm 26

room. After running the business from the dorms for a year, Ethan began renting a large house off campus to run sales and ordering functions. He designed the buttons and then shipped them to a third party manufacturer who would assemble them. The manufacturer then sent the merchandise to Ethan’s mother, who handled the distribution of the buttons out of her garage. She hired kids who would come over after school, sort the buttons, fill bags, and ship them.

“In the midst of the venture’s development, my parents still insisted I work as a busboy at O’Donnell’s Sea Food because they thought the business wouldn’t work out,” he laughs. “I was working for six dollars an hour there, while the business was earning five to ten thousand a month.

Finally I put my foot down and said I wasn’t going to continue at the restaurant.” While his Bar Mitzvah money and a student loan paid for his first semester of college, Ethan was able to use his button business to pay for each semester thereafter as he became the largest distributor and manufacturer of rock and roll buttons in the United States.

Though his assembly workforce included a number of autistic and handicapped workers, he never applied for the tax credit he qualified for because it was too much paperwork. “It was a win-win for both the workers and their parents,” Ethan recalls. “We gave them an opportunity and were able to help improve lives, and they provided valuable work in return.”

When he started college, Ethan was focused on obtaining a political science and economics degree with the expectation of attending law school following his undergraduate studies; however, he soon found himself putting his formal education on the backburner so he could focus on what really drove him—running on the track team and leading his highly successful business.

By his senior year, Ethan’s rock and roll button company was generating $3 million in annual revenue. It was at that time that Ethan decided to move the business to his home state of Maryland, finishing his final two classes at the University of Maryland.

In Maryland, at the age of 22, Ethan decided to build a warehouse for the company. He purchased some property in Gaithersburg and obtained an Industrial Revenue Bond from the state to expand the business and build a 40,000 square foot warehouse for production and distribution. The property included an office space for sales and space for a printing plant and manufacturing equipment, with the remainder of the space designed to be leased out to tenants.

Unfortunately, in a setback during the course of construction, his architect and a builder were both caught up in the savings and loan scandal and filed for

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

bankruptcy. This prompted the bank to pull its funding until Ethan got an occupancy permit and the building was fully leased.

This turn of events gave Ethan the opportunity to assume the role of general contractor tasked with bringing the project to completion. Yet it proved a more complicated task than he imagined, as the original subcontractors sought to file mechanics liens because the bankrupted builder had not yet paid them. Though the circumstances were dire, over the course of six or seven months, and with a lot of hard work, Ethan pulled it all together and completed construction of the building.

He was then able to lease space to an automotive repair firm and a company that installed a glass tempering furnace for glass work. The bank then funded the rest of the money, ensuring all the original subcontractors were paid in full.

Its early difficulties behind it, the business hummed along until the end of 1985, when jean jackets fell out of fashion, replaced by leather jackets that couldn’t withstand the pinprick of a button. Though Ethan had been shipping over a million buttons each month, the demand suddenly disappeared. “Being 24 years old, it wasn’t much fun anymore, and the business wasn’t growing,” he recalls. “Someone expressed interest in purchasing the building, and another party was interested in buying the inventory and assets of the building, so I sold both and went into semi-retirement for a while, trading index options in my own account.”

In order to track his options, Ethan bought an early Macintosh computer. He also began using a software package called PixelPaint, a predecessor to Photoshop.

Although he had done a lot of graphics work in the music merchandising business, he was amazed that technology had evolved such that he could get a color print directly from a computer. Ethan contacted a local distributor who owned or had access to equipment like color printers, scanners, and film recorders that would shoot a 35 mm slide from a computer file. As the equipment sat unused 90 percent of the time, he convinced the distributer to go into business scanning files or shooting slides for clients.

“It was a very early graphics service bureau,” he recalls.

From 1989 to 2001, this modest idea grew into a company called Executive Presentations, which then evolved into two divisions, EPI Systems and EPI Communications. These divisions then became MHI, ranked in 2001 by the Washington Business Journal as the largest advertising agency in D.C. Starting with work primarily with 35 mm slides, the company expanded to open a photo lab, and later began making large posters. It then dove into the trade show business, hired designers,

infiltrated the events staging industry, and made a name for itself in advertising, marketing, video production, multimedia, and web presence. The company raised mezzanine capital and venture capital, and continued to expand through acquisitions.

Eventually, the sheer size of the company took too much time away from Ethan’s personal life and allowed for less personalized attention for clients. He sold MHI in 2001 and created Verasolve, a smaller company focused on building teams to help clients realize their unique visions. Evoking the tenets that brought him success as a relay runner on the track team, Ethan recognized teamwork as a primary ingredient in his success. “I’m a big believer in delegating,” he affirms. “You can’t accomplish a significant number of things unless you delegate. I like to keep reports low, and it’s important to have people on the team who are self-starters and can get things done on their own. Let them run with things and let them come to you for significant decisions or when there are situations where they need some help and mentoring.”

This mentoring philosophy has played an important role in his leadership style through the years, and many of his employees have gone on to start their own thriving businesses. For Ethan, this highlights one of the most important lessons of business—that life isn’t all about business. “It’s about community,” he says. “It’s about sharing, teaching, being on boards of different organizations, and helping people less fortunate. It’s about working as a team to build a network of positive impacts that extend long after you’re gone.” Ethan, himself, sits on the boards of the Montgomery County Community Foundation and Imagination Stage, a children’s theater organization. The combined impact of his professional and philanthropic efforts has earned Ethan the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Ernst & Young, and Washingtonian Magazine’s Forty Under Forty award, among others.

In advising young adults entering the workforce today, Ethan reminds us that risk-taking is easiest when you’re young. “The opportunity is now,” he urges. “It helps to look at your life as a value stream, with respective rates of return. In your teens and 20s, if you make a mistake, you’re not giving a lot up. You’re not at the top of your earning potential, and you don’t have a family or a lot of fixed costs. This is the time you can really go out there, take some chances, make a mark for yourself, and see if you can latch onto something that’s really exciting and that really takes off. This is the time.” Indeed, whether it’s your leg of the race, or your moment to start a new entrepreneurial journey, this is the time to take the baton and run.

Ethan Assal

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Kristina Bouweiri Coming Full Circle Years ago, a leap of faith to learn a business she had no prior experience in placed Northern Virginia resident Kristina Bouweiri in the driver’s seat in the limousine and shuttle bus transportation industry. The ride since hasn’t always been smooth, but today, the entrepreneur and savvy businesswoman is President and CEO of one of the nation’s largest shuttle bus and limousine companies. Not only is she active in the business community of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, but Kristina also extends advice and a helping hand to women entrepreneurs abroad, making sure that the scope of her influence is not only linear, but a full circle.

A graduate of George Washington University with a degree in International affairs, Kristina hoped to follow in her father’s footsteps years ago and work for the Foreign Service. She had spent her childhood moving from Japan to Portugal to South Africa, where she attended boarding school with relatives of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

After graduation, she landed a job with a nonprofit overseas education fund that focused on uplifting the status of women. In this position, Kristina concentrated on global work, with particular emphasis on charities.

Unknown to her at the time, Kristina had one of the key traits that makes for a determined business person: the desire for financial success. While she and her two siblings had grown up comfortably, with the opportunity to travel the world at little to no cost, Kristina wanted to experience the full spectrum of life in other countries. This desire remained buried within her throughout her college career, but it began to reemerge after spending two years at her nonprofit job overseas. “I found many of the events at that job too heartbreaking,” she recalls. “I also realized I had spent my whole life moving every three years, and while I had loved it, by my mid-twenties, I was ready to settle down and establish roots, so I moved back to the United States.”

In the meantime, her future husband, William

Bouweiri, had recently moved from Lebanon to the United States, where he began work as a taxi driver. Two years later, William told his client, William Schreyer, then chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, that he was capable of running a limousine company better than anyone he had worked for. “Just about everyone in the limousine service has a similar story where some great, fantastic client helped them along the way,” Kristina says. “Mr. Schreyer was ours. He told William that if he started his own limousine company, he would get him the Merrill Lynch account.” And with that generous helping hand, Reston Limousine was incorporated in 1990.

At the time, Kristina was in marketing, and by a stroke of luck, she decided to cold-call William out of the yellow pages in hopes to make a sale. He was first intrigued by her business proposal, but after meeting several times to discuss the advertisement, was more intrigued by her personality and wit, so he asked her to dinner. Several months into their courtship, William suggested she leave her job and work for him. Kristina accepted, and within a year, they were married. Around the same time, the company landed a contract with the Hyatt Reston Hotel. “William knew Reston was a technology hub and a great place to start a business,” Kristina says. “And he was right. From 1990 to 2000, we rode the wave created from the IT boom in Reston.” Their contract with Hyatt Reston was also essential to their initial success, generating steady referrals that helped to build the business.

While she quickly embraced her new career, Kristina admits feeling the drawbacks of coming into the company with limited business knowledge. “Because I didn’t have the background in this business, I’ve learned everything by doing it wrong the first time,” she laughs.

She was forced to quickly learn through experience.

Early on, the Bouweiris had the opportunity to bid on a government contract for the U.S. Geological Survey, which they won, and Kristina soon realized bidding on contracts was the ticket to greater success. “I knew nothing about how to bid on government contracts, so Kristina Bouweiri

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we really landed it by accident,” she laughs in retrospect.

“I subscribed to Commerce Business Daily and started bidding on every government contract I could.”

The edge they began their company with, and what continues to distinguish Reston Limousine today, is attention to professionalism, detail, and quality, with the newest equipment loaded with the most recent technology available. Early on, Kristina and William dedicated themselves to answering phone calls 24/7, transferring calls to their home line after hours and always remaining personally reachable by clients. Their efforts raised the standards of the industry, allowing them to win every government contract they bid on over the next five years, including those with the Department of Health and Human Services, the IRS, and the Department of Justice.

While their unwavering commitment to high quality and impeccable standards set Reston Limousine apart for the initial years of business, the playing field was eventually leveled when their competitors began copying their key ingredients for success. While this in itself posed a problem, Kristina was more concerned at the time with the looming realization that, soon, their company would outgrow the limitations under which a business could bid on government contracts.

Because bids were limited to small companies, Kristina refocused her efforts on diversification into other markets, such as universities, hospitals, and tourism, for other sources of revenue. Her plan was a success, and in its first ten years, Reston Limousine grew from five to seventy vehicles and from $200,000 in revenue to over $5 million.

The massive growth of the company came with major changes in their personal lives as well. In 1996, Kristina and William introduced twins into the family.

Up until that point, Kristina had been unparalleled in her work ethic, staying connected to the company all hours of the day so that it was virtually her entire life.

She had expected the arrival of her children to easily fit into her busy schedule, but that wasn’t the case. “I wasn’t going to take maternity leave, and I wasn’t cut out to be a stay-at-home mother, so I planned to take them to work with me,” she explains. “I had cribs and everything set up in the office, but after a few days, I wanted to pull my hair out. I couldn’t focus on my work and I couldn’t take care of them, so I had to hire a nanny.”

In addition, the Bouweiris hired someone to answer the phones around the clock, since they quickly realized that business calls transferred to their home phones were constantly being interrupted by crying babies. “We 30

simply couldn’t work sixteen hour days anymore with two babies, and we were terrified that passing a portion of our work to someone else would make us broke. But as it actually turned out, the company doubled in size over the next twelve months,” Kristina remarks. “We had been trying to do everything ourselves before, but we weren’t experts, so we were only doing a mediocre job. When we hired actual experts, everything became so much more efficient. We learned to delegate in order to streamline our business strategy.”

Four years and two more children later, the Bouweiris experienced their second most significant business change. They had sold their house and were living in a hotel, awaiting construction of their new home in Leesburg. The couple decided that William would take a year away from Reston Limousine to oversee the construction. At first, the idea of running the company on her own was terrifying to Kristina, as she was already responsible for sales, dispatching, project management, and payroll, but after a short period of time, Kristina told William not to come back.

“We owned the business together, we had four kids, and we had managers that now did everything he used to do, such as fleet management, HR, and accounting,” she explains. “I was writing the proposals, managing the service we provided, and loving it. I wasn’t built to be a stay-at-home mother, so in 2000, we decided William would be the stay-at-home parent while I ran the company for our family.”

In the years since Kristina assumed the titles of President and CEO of the company, William and Kristina are no longer together, nor is William involved in the business. Though he was always an essential part of the company, Kristina’s unleashed creativity has produced demonstrable results: today, Reston Limousine operates a fleet of 170 vehicles and has revenues approaching $18 million. An exceptionally adroit networker, she ultimately saved the company in the aftermath of 9/11. The first ten years had run smoothly, with no debt and not even a line of credit, but in the wake of the terrorist attacks, business came to a standstill with no profit for the following five years.

The company accumulated $200,000 in debt, which led the IRS to suggest they declare bankruptcy—a notion that even now sends shudders of dread through Kristina.

“I told them over my dead body. I would never do it,” she recalls of the dark times. “But somehow I climbed out of the hole. I kept telling myself that we would make a comeback; that the boom times would come back.” However, more bad news was in store.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Reston Limousine was dropped by its bank since their close proximity to D.C. created a potential target for additional terrorist attacks. After being rejected by nineteen more banks over the following six months, Kristina finally found a new bank that allowed her to reorder her financing. Growth continued, but more slowly this time. Kristina sought new opportunities.

Reston Limousine invested in an upgraded fleet, adjusted its rates, and began targeting a different clientele.

More importantly, however, Kristina began a new and determined focus on building customer relationships and loyalty. “I decided to launch a Client Appreciation Lunch each month,” she explains. “I found twelve sponsors consisting of florists, caterers, bakers, and so on, and provided my customers with a great lunch, dessert, and door prizes. It has allowed me to meet fifteen hundred clients in just three years. I’ve broken bread with them, I’ve created a dialogue with them, and I’ve given them my business card with my e-mail address and cell phone number and told them they can talk to me anytime they want.” The lunches have also allowed her to spread the word about what the other sponsors offer, leading to focus groups that generate new ideas and inside information as to what the client truly wants in a product. “Even though I’ve given out my cell phone number, no one has ever called me,” she continues. “They like having access to me, but they’ve never abused it. At the end of the day, people just want to do business with someone they know and like.”

While she credits most of the company’s growth to her networking skills, Kristina readily hands all credit to Vistage, an executive peer advisory group, for teaching her to be business savvy. Attending Vistage meetings opened her eyes to the hidden patterns and secrets of successful business management. “As my company has grown, I’ve had to hire smarter and smarter people,” she explains. “I joined Vistage to stay on top of my game and learn how to manage more efficiently and develop new skills.”

Of her current leadership style, Kristina chooses to empower her managers to make decisions rather than micromanage them. “I think I am a nice person to work for, but I’m firm, and my employees respect me because I’ve done every role in the company throughout its evolution,” she explains. She also understands the importance of her current role and is mindful each day of just how many people depend on her to make the right decision. “I was in the break room getting coffee the other day and a driver thanked me for running a company that was able to survive the economic downturn,” she details. “It meant so much to me. I’m responsible for keeping three hundred people employed with food on their tables for their families. I take a lot of pride in that.”

To recent college graduates entering the business world, Kristina emphasizes the importance of selfconfidence. “I had no real confidence when I began at Reston Limousine, but time and experience helped with that,” she affirms. “I learned I had to get out of my comfort zone to grow both myself and the company.

My advice is to believe you can do anything you want to do and just work harder than anyone else until you get there.”

Looking back on William’s initial invitation that she join the company, Kristina really had nothing to fear.

She had a natural instinct for business that allowed her to transform Reston Limousine into the largest transportation service in the Washington metropolitan area, and among the largest in the nation. Now, Kristina can reflect on the journey and see that her career has come full-circle. Today, she often finds herself involved with international transportation arrangements, and is asked to speak at global businesswomen summits, discussing how she grew a successful small business in a male-dominated world. She is able to help businesswomen in third world countries, while also giving back locally. “My career started out with international development in the third world, and now I’m helping women entrepreneurs from all over the globe. I couldn’t ask for a better transition.”

Kristina Bouweiri

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Laurie Keyser Brunner Find a Way, Or Make One Long ago though it was, Laura (Laurie) Keyser Brunner very distinctly remembers the moment she decided to become an executive. Only a few months into her first job with AT&T, driving to work off of Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda, Maryland, she was struck with the realization that would change the rest of her life. “I am going to run a business and be an executive leader,” she said to herself.

Over the next 12 years, Laurie saw her star rise and her career blossom, fulfilling and then surpassing that goal she set on her drive. Today, she has assumed her most ambitious role yet as the President of MainStream Management, a management consulting firm focused on helping mid-sized companies improve their financial performance and overall market growth. Her own growth since entering the business world has been as impressive as it has been surprising—after all, her arena of success is a far cry from the forestry and natural resources degree she pursued in college. But for someone whose high school motto, “Find a way, or make one,” has stuck with her as a lifelong personal philosophy, it’s hardly surprising that, once her desires crystallized, she pursued them single-mindedly.

Laurie attributes her competitive spirit to her early interest in sports. Growing up in Potomac, Maryland, she had a close relationship with her father, an electrical engineer who loved athletics and the outdoors and encouraged her pursuits. He introduced her to golf, which she came to love, as well as baseball, which, she laughs, she never did come to appreciate. “I’m a sports junkie, and I listen to ESPN every morning, but I hate baseball!” she says.

Laurie excelled at soccer, golf and tennis, and recalls that her father never missed one of her varsity soccer games in high school. Her tremendous success in business stems, in large part, from this success in sports earlier in life. “Not only is success in sports advantageous from a business standpoint, but it enables you to be coachable,” she explains. “To be successful in sports, you have to accept the input of a coach. Even

the pros have coaches. I think that, along the way in life, I’ve searched for that coaching. Finding the right mentor and being able to listen to feedback from a manager is critical.”

Her participation in sports also brought Laurie her first jobs—one as an intern at the Kemper Open for the PGA Tour office, and another as a tennis instructor at a summer camp. Although no one had told her to get a job, she returned to the camp to teach every summer during high school. Ever ambitious, she was put in charge of the other instructors during the summer after her junior year. The summer after that, she hired her own staff and ran the entire program—a glimpse of the success that lay ahead.

After graduating from the Holton-Arms School, Laurie enrolled in the University of the South, a small liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee, where she channeled her love of the outdoors into her pursuit of a forestry degree. In retrospect, Laurie wishes she had had some kind of mentorship to guide her career when she left school, but she drew on the wisdom of her schoolgirl days: find a way, or make one. “You can’t ever be too proud during your first job out of college,” she advises. Striking out on her own with no clear picture of the future, she saw an ad in the Washington Post classifieds for an Administrative Assistant position. She applied, got the job, and began her professional career.

It was during that job that she had a stroke of luck and encountered her first important mentor. In her new office, Laurie was working for Barbara Hackman Franklin, an incredibly successful force in the business world who was, at that time, serving on the Board of Directors for six Fortune 100 companies. A member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Reagan’s US Trade Advisory Board, she later became the Secretary of Commerce under President George H. W. Bush.

“Barbara was one of my most important early influences,” Laurie remarks. “The impact that she made on how I work with other people was tremendous.

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I’m still paying it forward, because she really gave me insight into what I could do as an individual and what I could do as a woman.” It was Barbara who encouraged Laurie to pursue an MBA, and so she gained admission to the George Washington University and returned to school. While earning her MBA in Marketing, she met her future husband, who became another career advisor as she explored potential paths to success.

Upon finishing her degree, she looked into opportunities at AT&T, MCI and BellAtlantic, and hoping to eventually move into marketing, applied to work as part of the AT&T sales team. She was hired as a National Account Executive for AT&T’s USAir account, her first position at the firm where she would spend a dozen years.

From there, Laurie rose quickly within the company, moving from National Account Executive to International Account Executive through her hard work, ambition, and a handful of executive sponsors.

She also stresses the importance of vocalizing the desire to move up. “You need to tell people that you want to succeed, that you want to advance,” she emphasizes.

“Managers can’t know that. They can certainly provide mentoring and guidance, but it’s up to you to basically raise your hand and say, ‘I want to really excel here.’ I did do that, and I ended up with a couple of executives who really helped me along the way and gave me opportunities.” Among them, she fondly remembers Larry Bell, the Executive for Business Network Sales, who taught her to always pursue perfection and professionalism in business. He emphasized doing things correctly, holding people accountable, and always arriving prepared.

It was also during her time at AT&T that Laurie learned what she considers the most important lesson of her career—the importance of integrity above all else. While working on a high profile account, she and other employees became aware that a client had been overbilled. Laurie alerted her leadership about the incident, but no immediate action was taken.

“That was a huge learning experience for me,” Laurie explains. “Even though I had raised the issue, I allowed the direction of those above me to dictate right from wrong. At the time, I felt I’d done everything I should have done, but in that moment, I knew I could—and should—have done more.” The matter was ultimately resolved, but not until much later. “I carry that lesson with me always, to have the courage to communicate and behave with integrity, and to always do things that are consistent with what is right. With all the pressures for business results today, staying true to yourself is, 34

I think, a challenge for some, but it’s also the most important trait a leader can have. Living your values is ultimately the most rewarding thing of all.”

Laurie was a District Sales Manager for midmarket accounts when AT&T began offering buyout packages to trim their employee ranks. She took the money, and without missing a step, found a job with a training and consulting firm in Arlington. The firm, ESI International, grew dramatically during her years there; when she left in 2011, there were nearly 100 people in her worldwide organization. She had started with three. She had become a member of the executive team, building a high performing leadership team of her own and enjoying her time in that capacity so much that she had no plans to move on. But the economy changed the fortunes of the training market, and after three reorganizations of the business, she knew it was time to move on. When a former client of hers put her in touch with the President of MainStream Global Solutions, her decision was confirmed. The two had lunch, and a month later, she went on to meet with the Founder and Chairman of MainStream Holdings. She was elated when he asked to come onboard as President of MainStream Management—an opportunity for personal and professional growth she could not, in good conscience, turn down.

MainStream Management was founded in 1999, and in the years since has expanded from its initial focus in corporate restructuring into business strategy, including financial and operational improvement.

The consulting firm’s proud mission is to help middle market businesses set up the right strategies for business growth, which encapsulates everything from designing the most efficient operational processes for long term customer loyalty, to securing the right capital structures to sustain growth. Mainstream Management works with the stakeholders of midsized businesses like banks, lawyers, and private equity companies to improve the results of their clients and investments, with special emphasis on manufacturing and consumer product companies.

Today, Mainstream Management is a team of about 50 full-time staff and contractors across the country.

“As President, my job is a little bit of everything,” Laurie points out. “You’re steering the ship, you’re the captain, and you have to set the course. You also have to be aware of the environment you’re in. I think functionally, you have to be involved as a leader in every aspect of the business. You have to be able to rely on people to run their parts, but you can’t ask anybody to do something you wouldn’t do yourself. So

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

I’m out there meeting clients, rolling up my sleeves and thinking about products and capability. I’m developing marketing plans, making cold calls, and reviewing the financials. I’m thinking about networking for business partnerships and strategy. It’s very broad, and I think the rewarding part of running a business is that you get to think about it all. You’re not just in one silo.”

As a leader, Laurie is clearly hands-on, eager to be involved in all aspects of the business and never content to let others do the heavy lifting. She also describes her leadership style as collaborative, pointing out that the best leaders surround themselves with smart, talented people, and try to create a cohesive team. “From a leadership perspective, you want to give your employees runway, empower them, and give them credit,” Laurie explains. “Be very open about the contributions those individuals made. You’re successful because of your team.” Laurie’s leadership style also hinges on the importance of feedback, both positive and negative. “From a management perspective, I think it’s important to give feedback,” she affirms. “Too often we’re afraid to tell people they didn’t do something so well, because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.

But really, that kind of feedback can be the greatest gift you can give somebody.”

If Laurie’s goal in life is to make a lot of money, it is only so that she can give it all away. “That’s actually what drives me,” she remarks. “It’s not the car, or the house, although those are certainly nice things to want

in life. It’s the prospect of making the world a better place—to truly make a difference.” It’s also important to her to bestow those values on her two sons, ages 16 and 13, and to keep them grounded. They recently accompanied her on a business trip to China, where they took a day out to visit an orphanage for handicapped children. The boys decided to sponsor a child there, demonstrating that they’ve grown up with both an appreciation for what they have, and charitable hearts.

“It’s crucial to show your children how important it is to do something for someone else,” Laurie emphasizes.

“That’s the legacy that truly lives on.”

Professionally, this legacy will also live on in the lives Laurie has touched through coaching—members of the next generation who will undoubtedly follow in her footsteps. She tries to mentor and encourage younger employees the way she was mentored, helping them understand the context in which they work and to reach their potential. As she coaches and emulates those that coached her, she stresses the importance of integrity and professionalism, helping young people develop the kind of ambition and can-do attitude she has employed throughout her own career. “After you retire, your values, your style, and how you lead continue on through those who have worked with and for you, and that makes your position as a leader all the more important,” she avows. If Laurie has her way, plenty more young executives will also find their way— or make one—as they pursue success.

Laurie Keyser Brunner

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Betty Buck Ready for Anything Betty Buck answered the phone at 7:00 AM on Monday morning, still groggy from her red-eye flight from Carmel, California, where she and her company had redeemed their prize vacation for winning the Miller High Life Achievement Award. It was a nurse on the phone, informing her she had to be at her doctor’s office by noon. Betty’s stomach turned, and she immediately called for her best friend to come over. She knew she would need moral support for whatever the doctor needed to tell her.

For weeks, Betty had been in unbearable pain, such that she needed to consume an entire bottle of extra-strength Tylenol everyday just to go about her daily life. Her previous doctor had assured her it was all stress-related, which wasn’t entirely farfetched considering her beloved father had just passed away, she was in the middle of a divorce, and she had just taken over the family company Buck Distributimg Company. But the pain was so deep and so consistent that she knew in her heart something was terribly wrong.

When she arrived at the hospital, her doctor told her she had a progressed form of ovarian cervical cancer, and that at 8:00 AM the next morning, they were going to perform surgery to remove the 18 golf ball-sized cysts they’d found. “They told me my chances weren’t good, but that they’d do their best,” she says. “So I left and had five hours to tell my family, friends, and employees what was going on before I had to come back to prepare for surgery. In a single moment, I had to put my entire life on hold.”

During surgery the next day, the doctor found her condition was even worse than he had thought. The surgery took longer than expected, but despite the odds, it was successful. She spent three more weeks in the hospital recovering, but with the help of her friends and coworkers, who kept the company running smoothly and looked after her three children (five, seven, and eight at the time), she was able to step back into her life without skipping a beat. “I never once doubted that I would be alright,” she says. “I had just gone through a horrific divorce, and my ex-husband decided he didn’t

want to see our children anymore, so I simply did not believe in my soul that God would leave my children parentless. I was adopted and always promised that I would give back what I was given, and I hadn’t finished doing that for my kids yet.”

Today, Betty is back in full health and the President and CEO of Buck Distributing Company, a malt beverage distributor headquarters in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. They focus mainly on beers and crafts, and as of recently have begun to dabble in wine and liquors as well, distributing to all of Southern Maryland and parts of the Eastern Shore.

Her father started the company in 1946 from one brewery in Cumberland and a single truck, which he used to personally distribute his beer. For years, he maintained his small but dedicated brewing business, until Miller selected him from hundreds of candidates to be their Southern Maryland distributor. Since then, the company has taken on countless kinds of beers, from Rolling Rock to Yuengling to many craft beers, so that today, comprised of 128 employees, the company sells five million cases a year.

It seems only natural that Betty would now be the head of the company her father started nearly seven decades ago. Growing up, she was a self-described “dedicated Daddy’s Girl,” following her father everywhere and mimicking what she observed, such that her Barbie Dolls rode tractors and unloaded cases of beer. As soon as she was able to walk, her father would wake her up every Saturday morning to bring her to the warehouse, where she’d play or get into trouble. “My mother believed girls should never wear pants,” she recalls. “So she’d put me in a little dress with white socks and black buckle shoes and send me off to the warehouse with Daddy, only to be horrified by how dirty I was when I came home.”

Betty started formally helping out at the warehouse around six years old doing whatever her Dad asked her to do, whether it was cleaning toilets or salvaging bottles from cases of broken glass to be repacked. “I wanted to do it because it gave me a sense of independence,” she laughs. “It was fun for me, and I loved going down Betty Buck

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and messing around with the guys. We’d all have lunch together on Saturdays, and Dad would make sure they cleaned up their language when I was around. It was like family.”

Betty’s parents had always wanted children, but after three stillbirths, they realized adoption was the path for their family to take. They first adopted their son Howard, and then Betty ten months later, just hours after she’d been born. She was not aware she’d been adopted until one day at Sunday School when Betty was six years old, her childhood friend Becky announced, “Betty Jane, you can’t come to my birthday party because you have adoption.” Naturally, Betty was horrified, assuming that to have “adoption” must be synonymous with some terrible disease like the measles. When she went crying to her mother, her parents decided the time was right to sit their children down and tell them the full story. “We weren’t at all bothered by the news because my parents raised us so that we knew how very loved we were,” she comments.

While Betty spent most of her time at the warehouse with her father, her brother, Howard, had gotten into just enough trouble to land him a spot at Charlotte Hall Military Academy. Their father wanted to ensure Betty stayed out of trouble, so, much to her horror, he looked into an all-girls boarding school for her to attend. She desperately wanted to stay home with her parents and attend a public school with her friends, so father and daughter struck a deal that she could stay as long as she got straight A’s in every class she took until graduation.

“The only class I came close to not making an A in was in chemistry in eleventh grade,” she admits. “I was one point shy of that A, so I begged my teacher to let me write extra credit assignments and clean beakers for all hours after school—anything so that I wouldn’t have to be sent away to boarding school. I explained the situation to my teacher, and he could barely believe it.

He gave me the extra point, but to this day, I think he gave it to me as a gift.”

When Betty was not devoted to her studies, she kept busy by giving back or getting involved in her community. She was a cheerleader and basketball statistician, and on weekends and over vacations, she volunteered at the main office of her high school.

When she was old enough, she began working at a dress shop, and eventually, as a lifeguard. “In our family, you worked,” she laughs. “You never sat around or spent your summer lounging by the pool. You always had a job, even if you weren’t paid for it. That was certainly a life lesson I learned growing up, which I think ultimately helped me fight my battle with cancer.” It also taught her 38

to never take no for an answer, like when she tried to join the boys’ baseball team. “Coaches from other teams got upset, but I tried out just like everyone else. I was better than a lot of the boys,” she smiles. “I even beat my old boyfriend out of third base. He was so mad he wouldn’t take me to the prom, so some other boy did instead.”

While she was tough on the boys, her father was tough on her. Most often, he refused to let her out of his sight, such that when she was sixteen, he bought her a canary-yellow Gold Duster with a block engine. “He wanted to make sure he could not only see me coming from twenty miles away, but also hear me,” she laughs.

“He knew everyone in town and made sure they kept him updated on my whereabouts. If I was driving up to the warehouse, he’d know who I was with and what I was wearing before I even arrived.”

Before graduating high school, Betty was awarded a full scholarship to Lawrence University to play classical piano. She desperately wanted to go because she had earned her spot there after years of hard work and practice, but her father decided Appleton, Wisconsin was simply too far away, and that she would be better suited at the University of Maryland. Even after she gave in and started at the University of Maryland, he would get in touch with his business friends on campus to find out where she was tutoring and when, so that he could conveniently run into her. “I was so mad at him that I changed all my classes and refused to come home, so I didn’t see him from August to Christmas Eve,” she says.

Despite her efforts to make the best of her collegeexperience, Betty felt too unsettled by the vastness and impersonal nature of the university, so she took a job at the National Association of Manufacturers in D.C. after her first year and never looked back. “I was 18, making good money, making lots of friends, and visiting New York City every week, so I was just having a ball,” she says.

In a mere matter of months, however, her father asked her to leave her job to join the family business and computerize the company. “I was still mad at him for the whole issue with college, so I told him I would only come if he gave me a contract that specifically set aside an amount of money for me to spend on technology that he couldn’t touch, and of course he said no,” she says.

“We are both hard-headed people, and I was trying to teach him a lesson, so for two weeks, we didn’t say a single word to each other, even at the dinner table.”

At the end of the two weeks, her father came home and threw a legal contract in front of her that his lawyer had drawn up, which specifically met her demands. “He

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

upheld his end of the deal, so in 1975, despite a salary cut, I joined Buck Distributing,” she says. “Since that time, I only had to pull out that contract once when he was being difficult.”

Betty spent the next ten years modernizing the company, which, for a company that has a tendency to retain employees for decades, has been on ongoing process. Her father was naturally gifted at math, with the ability to store all the necessary numbers and details in his head, so it was a long road to shift the company culture away from taking notes on the backs of envelopes, to putting every piece of information in a database and becoming familiar with the iPad as a daily workplace necessity.

Betty never directly asked her father for more responsibility, but she never had to. Gradually, he began assigning her more and more tasks. “He would come to me and say, ‘I don’t have the patience for the politics anymore, so I want you to take over the Chamber of Commerce activity,’” she says. “After I’d do one thing, he’d pass off another task to me, and then another and another.”

This pattern continued until one day, in 1985, he told her he just was not hungry anymore, and he wanted her to take over the company. His news came as a surprise for everyone, but even more shocking was his ability to completely step away and let Betty take the lead. “We would have coffee together at the office after he stepped down, and once I asked him for his advice on a huge decision I had to make for the company,” she says. “He refused to tell me anything, even though the wrong decision would have cost us $25,000. I ended up making the wrong decision anyway, and I asked him how he could have knowingly let me do that. He just said I had to learn that is was okay to make mistakes, and that usually, they were always fixable.”

Betty’s transition to taking over the company was far more complicated than simply taking her father’s place.

Because the company represents Miller, Betty had to travel to Milwaukee to seek approval from the president of Miller, Leonard Goldstein; however, Betty had known Goldstein for most of her life, and naively felt it would be a seamless transition. When she arrived in Milwaukee and told Goldstein that her father was retiring and planned to hand his position over to her, the President was stunned. “The problem was that I was I was a woman, and I was 28, so I would be the youngest person to ever run the company,” she explains. The President decided to call an emergency meeting with all the Vice Presidents, who put together a list of classes and sales targets she would have six months to accomplish before

they even considered her.

Being the savvy businesswoman that she is, Betty agreed to their decision and returned home to accomplish the tasks, all the while caring for her three small children and running her company. Almost as soon as she took the assignment, however, her luck turned, and it seemed every possible obstacle was out to keep her from her goal. “All three of my children got the chicken pox, and a month later I caught my husband cheating, so I suddenly had a divorce on my hands as well,” she says.

The most trying of it all, however, occurred when she was in Milwaukee for a class, and received news that her father had suffered a massive heart attack.

She raced home and spent the following weeks sleeping in the Intensive Care Unit, since she was the only one who could keep him calm. “I was there every night, and we had some of the most amazing conversations I’ve had in my entire life,” she says. “He asked me one night if he’d ever really hurt me, and I told him the one time was when I was 16 and got in my first car accident. He came out to make sure everything was all right, but then he just left me there. Of all the times my older brother got in trouble, he never once left him behind, but the one time I did, he left me to fend for myself. When I asked him why he did it, he started crying and said he did it because I didn’t need him. I could handle it, but he was sorry for having hurt me.”

To everyone’s surprise, her father stabilized enough to go home, so shortly after, Betty returned to Milwaukee to finish her remaining classes and then awaited the President’s final decision. “I stood up at that meeting and told them, ‘Don’t even think about telling me no.

I did everything you asked in less time than you gave me, and all my reports are better than you required me to do. I don’t want to play your game. I’m capable of doing this, and my father, who you all love and trust, believes in me more than anyone else for this position,’” she recounts. “They approved me, and Goldstein joked that none of them had the guts to tell me no after all I’d been through.”

One of her first major accomplishments as the new owner of Buck Distributing was to honor all the hard work her father had done during his career, so Betty entered the company into a prestigious contest for highest beer sales. After submitting endless reports and paperwork, they managed to win the Miller Masters Award. “We didn’t tell Dad we had won; instead, we hung the huge banner they gave us outside the warehouse for him to see when he drove up to work,” she says. “He was always this big, 6’8” tough guy, and that banner made him cry, he was so proud. We’ve managed to win it every Betty Buck

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year since.”

The Buck family celebrated Betty’s accomplishments until, in July of 1986, her father succumbed to his failing health and passed away, and barely any time passed before Betty started experiencing the ominous pain that would turn into her battle with cancer. She had the tests done the day before she left for the Miller High Life trip in California, so while it was a wonderful time, she felt troubled and unsettled for most of the vacation. “I went driving around by myself to try and find some peace, and I ended up finding the Carmel Mission, which is just a beautiful place,” she recalls. “I met a monk there who insisted I walk with him to look at the children’s festival they were hosting, and I finally found my peace that day. I truly believe that experience helped keep me calm during my surgeries and the aftermath.”

Since triumphing in her battle with cancer, Betty has brought Buck Distributing to a new level of success.

She’s grown the company, doubled sales, and won countless awards, all of which she feels sure is the direct result of her strong team. “As a leader, I make sure I pick the best team to surround myself with, so I can trust them to do their jobs and make the right decision,” she says. “I don’t like to micromanage. I like to let people do what they know how to do, and so far, my team has been exceptional at doing just that.” Even with all her success, she has always made an extra effort to give back to her community in any way she can, be it through a company golf tournament to raise money for Cerebral Palsy research, to mentoring children and volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club. She also makes a point to spend time with young people entering the business world so she can share her leadership experience and advice. “I always tell them to pursue something they

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have a passion for,” she says. “But no matter what, they have to give back. There will always be someone who has less than you, and even doing the smallest thing can mean the world to someone else.”

While she is proud of her awards and business success, her greatest accomplishments are her four children, three of which are biological, and one who was adopted after her divorce. “I always wanted to give back the way my parents did, so I adopted my youngest son, Timmy,” she says. “I’ve been open with him from the start that he is my special gift, and I let him know that if he ever wanted to seek out his biological mother, I’d help him. I sought out my biological half-sister, and we were very close until she died of brain cancer last year, but it was such a gift to find her. I would want that for my son as well.” Beyond Timmy, Betty’s family has continued to grow with the addition of her loving husband, whose she been with for the past ten years, and his two children.

As her company continues to excel, Betty hopes to pass the legacy of her company on to her children, who have all sought to get involved. Her oldest daughter, Kelly, is the Craft Beer Specialty Manager, while her second daughter, Erin, is the Sales Manager. As of recently, her youngest son, Tim, decided to join the business as well, and Betty has started all of her children where her father started her: at the bottom, helping on the delivery trucks. “I know family businesses can be hard, but I think we do so well because we’ve never allowed each other to cut corners,” she says. “I think the fact that my father was hard on me made me tough in business and in life, so now I’m treating my kids the same way, so that when the company is ready to pass on to the third generation, they will be ready for anything.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Hilary Fordwich The Lever and the Fulcrum With a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” It is this concept that Hilary Fordwich, a Surrey, England born, business development icon that has taken the U.S. government contracting scene by storm, brings to her work. By analyzing the current climate strategically and knowing the best place on the lever to apply force, she is shifting the fate of proposals toward a more effective and innovative future.

A week in the life of a mover and shaker like Hilary begins on Sunday mornings at 7 a.m., when she hosts Government Contracting Weekly on the CBS affiliate station, WUSA Channel 9, as part of its Sunday morning power block. As the host, Hilary interviews CEOs and executives of key government contractors in the greater Washington D.C. Metro Area. Personally guiding the trajectory of each segment in the trenches isn’t enough, however; Hilary also invites most of the guests and has developed Strategic Alliances to bolster the show’s reach.

Off-screen, Hilary is the Senior Vice President of AOC Key Solutions, the show’s sponsor, a firm specializing in speaking, training, and orals coaching for government contractors and professionals in service organizations around the Washington metropolitan region. The company, founded in 1983, provides strategy, capture, and proposal services for government contractors.

“Quite simply, our typical client is any government contractor that wants to win a proposal,” she explains.

“That client doesn’t have to be of a certain size. The top 200 government contractors would be a good list to describe our target demographic, but even small companies can go after $100 million opportunities, and we know how to help them achieve those goals.”

Hilary’s position at AOC Key Solutions and at its business development division, the KSI Institute, interplays with her decades of business development experience and her Sunday morning show to place her at a nexus point of the government contracting universe. “Forming a web of strategic alliances through

these networks, we are developing an entire business concept and a business development model around the show, with the vision of transforming it into a fulcrum for the government contracting industry,” she affirms.

“In this way, all my various roles are intertwined. Guests of the show, clients of KSI, and clients from years prior to joining KSI all move together in tandem, so the resulting sum is greater than the original parts.”

Hilary’s career has always revolved around business development, so AOC Key Solutions has been a perfect fit for her professional skill set. As a solid, client-oriented, results-driven company with strong integrity and a commitment to excellence, it’s been the easy solution to the many questions her own clients and contacts have approached her with, creating a win-win for all involved. “They deliver exemplary strategy, capture, and proposal services—services I can recommend to others with confidence,” she says. “This is perhaps due to AOC Key Solutions’ CEO and co-founder, Jim McCarthy, who’s a wonderful and honest man. I’m very proud to work for him and with him.”

Before Hilary joined AOC Key Solutions, she was still exploring the possibility of Government Contracting Weekly and searching for sponsors of the show. When Jim invited her to speak at their AOC Key Solutions retreat, she heard him address his company, and the pieces of the puzzle immediately began to fall into place before her eyes. “It was as if there were two trains headed toward the station at the same time,” she details. “I pulled Jim aside and told him about the show.

Almost before I had finished speaking, he had said yes to sponsoring it. Not only did he say yes, but I would soon join AOC Key Solutions as a senior VP as well.”

Jim saw in Hilary what everybody does: a singleminded focus and a powerful drive to work hard and do whatever it takes to succeed. Indeed, Hilary has proven herself to be an exceptionally capable woman again and again in the face of a business world dominated by men, which hasn’t exhausted her energy levels, but instead fuels them. Even before she started her own company, Hilary Fordwich

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Hilary had established a pattern of paving the way, always identifying the fulcrum in each situation and placing her hands on the lever accordingly. In the 1980s and 90s at KPMG, already one of the largest professional services companies in the world, Hilary was a trailblazer.

“For every position I’ve held, I’ve been the first person in that role,” Hilary laughs. She was the first to head KPMG’s practice development in Long Island, and she became the first regional leader in New York City.

Later, as well, she became the first in a national role to head their government contracting business, and then the first to head business development in Amsterdam.

Hilary is used to being a first, and through her efforts in clearing a pathway for others down the road, she is certainly not the last.

Through these increasing levels of responsibility, Hilary embodied a spirit of entrepreneurialism that would soon translate into founding her own company—a business that flourished for a full decade.

And while she was born in England, Hilary associates her entrepreneurial side with America. “I’m an American by spirit,” she avows. “I love the spirit of America. I came here as a 15 year old girl, and I feel very comfortable with the way business works here. My friends are here. My life is here. I’m entrepreneurial, and I love the dynamism of America—the can-do attitude that allows people to truly reach their potential.”

Still, Hilary says that her soul is English. “Some of my most treasured belongings are my English antiques,” she explains. “If you could give me the choice of any movie to watch, I would pick something English.” This commingling of her English soul and American spirit lies on a foundation of a refreshing genuineness of character that is as winning as it is amusing. “People laugh at me,” Hilary says, “but I wear my 1980s clothes, no jewelry, and I drive an old car. I don’t really understand what HD television is all about.” When an airline broke her driver—Hilary is a serious golfer, and was a contributing editor for ABC Capitol Golf Weekly for four years—she was thrilled that they were able to repair the club rather than pay for a new one.

It was in England, as a nine year old, that Hilary first noticed that there was something special in the way others saw her. When she spoke, others would listen. Her school class had 50 girls, and without even auditioning, Hilary was selected by the school’s teachers to be the lead in the school play. “I had never thought of myself as being different from anybody else and I didn’t think I stood out in any way, so for me, that was a pivotal moment,” she recalls. “I remember so vividly that it made me think differently about myself than I 42

had before.”

In college, Hilary studied political science and gained a much more nuanced, acute understanding of human nature. “In a sense, I believe the study of political science is the same as that of professional services,” she explains. “People like to think they make intellectual decisions, but that’s often not the case. People in the business world always want to talk about need, but need has very little to do with the choices we make. Nobody in America needs a flat screen TV. You can go into some of the poorest parts of the country right now and find a flat screen on the wall. It’s not all about need. It’s about want.”

Reflecting deeply about what she truly wanted in life, Hilary knew that a flat screen TV couldn’t make her happy—she wanted to change the world. Long after she was no longer a child, and long after she had become a de facto American, she went full steam ahead toward success and found that the only place she felt driven to compromise her 24/7 work ethic was for her own children. “I founded my own company, in part so that I could be closer to my children,” she says. “I didn’t see their first footsteps because I was working. My Mummy said to me that if I missed them, I would never be able to buy back their childhoods, so that was also a pivotal moment of realization in my life.”

Hilary learned many valuable lessons from her mother, though more by example than by explicit lessons. “Mummy is my everything,” Hilary says, “but my decisions all came from me. Whatever the opposite of a helicopter parent is, that is Mummy. She never told my sister or me not to smoke or drink. She knew the only way she could prevent us from doing the bad things in life was to have us not want to do it ourselves.”

In addition to teaching healthy habits by example, Hilary’s mother showed both the potential highs and lows of working in the business world.

“Mummy is brilliant,” Hilary says. “She could have been the CEO of any company, but she was an office manager. In her era, men had an office, and the women were there running everything. She was interfacing with the auditors from KPMG for an investment banking firm, yet she was paid as a secretary. She was treated well—that is, they were nice to her. But she never made the money she could have.” But her highest praise is not specific to any particular lesson or example of work ethic. “She is simply incredible,” Hilary says.

“She’s a doer, and she can take care of everything. She’s immensely wise. I always say ‘Mummy always knows best.’ My mother’s my best friend, and we’re so close.

Without her, my life will be very different.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

It’s no wonder, then, that being the best mother she can be is among Hilary’s top priorities. She’s compromised when she’s had to, and she’s set her earning goals to be enough to give her children what they need. “I have two sons and a daughter, and they get good grades, play on varsity teams in good schools, are honest, behave well, are good to other people and work hard,” she says proudly.

But Hilary is not only a mother to her own children.

When it comes to charitable giving and organizing, if you can name it in this town, she’s been involved. She’s organized for the March of Dimes, Multiple Sclerosis, the American Cancer Society, balls for Leukemia, Heart and Kidney Health, and Financial literacy via Junior Achievement for inner city youth, as well as golf via The First Tee. “It’s important to do as much as you can,” she says. “It’s important to make a positive difference in people’s lives with every opportunity you get.”

Beyond the legacy of her children and her charity, Hilary’s web of impact will certainly be defined by the vital contributions she’s made to her field. Whether it’s through speaking engagements, her television show, or her place as a facilitator at the fulcrum of

the government contracting industry, the difference she makes continues to evolve on a daily basis as she works to connect the dots and evoke an increasingly compelling vision. Along this same vein, she has long considered authoring a book, which would add another dimension to this impact in the future.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Hilary reminds us that anyone is capable of achieving the level of success she’s achieved.

“Everybody is created equal,” she says. “I don’t think I’m smarter than the average person—quite the contrary, I’m actually not that smart. Everyone should be able to produce what I have, making a good living for their families and finding true happiness along with it. We all have that potential. The only way to achieve it is to work hard, and to engender trust and respect in others.”

At a time when over seven percent of the American workforce is unemployed, and countless more find themselves in jobs or careers that aren’t aligned with their ultimate goals, Hilary’s words are perhaps not the end goal, but the fulcrum itself—that pivot point we must all locate for ourselves and use to shift the course of our lives down the path we dream is possible.

Hilary Fordwich

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Norman Fortier Acts of Doing Cleaning bathrooms and sweeping floors is no dream job—especially if those floors are in the highly industrialized bulk mail center of the Postal Service, and especially if that sweeper is struggling with a painful and unsteady knee that makes standing for long hours all that much harder. But for Norm Fortier, it was a dream job— not for the usual reasons, like a hefty paycheck or a flashy reputation, but for the right reasons. It was one “act of doing” in a chain of such actions that, he hoped, would ultimately get Norm to where he wanted to be.

While taking classes full-time, his fulltime job as a custodian allowed him to support himself and his young family. He had also grown up with a strong work ethic at the core of his being, recognizing that a job done right was a job well done regardless of the prestige attached. Small steps in the right direction make up the journey and no experience is insubstantial, no matter how trivial it seems in the present. “I tell my son now, if you can’t get one job that pays you what you want, get two jobs,” he explains, of his uncompromising willingness to work.

“If you want it bad enough, you’ll do it. And I wanted it bad enough.”

Now the President, CEO, and founder of iSystems Group, Inc., Norm maintains his positive attitude and admirable work ethic by constantly keeping his hands in as many projects as possible. Last year, he developed strategic plans for the company, and in addition to working full-time, he also manages company benefits and human capital. In a remarkable team effort, his wife, Monica, works part time as the Facilities Security Officer in addition to her full time job as a program manager at a large company. iSystems specializes in program and project management. As one of only eight hundred people in the world who possesses the Project Management Institute’s PgMP credential, Norm’s goal is to help companies and government agencies realize the benefits of their IT solutions. “There are good companies with strong IT capabilities but no enterprise strategy above single projects to manage them as a portfolio or program,” he explains. “So I work with them to look across projects

to find efficiencies through standardization, governance, and benefits management, helping them understand how to gain efficiencies and deliver that IT solution faster to the stakeholders.”

The birth of iSystems did not happen overnight, however; nor was it simply a product of Norm’s unimaginable willingness to work. Rather, he first launched iSystems in 1996 as Cyberworx Internet Services, essentially a small side project he started at a desk in a room above his garage. He began developing websites for local Memphis companies, such as Echo Records and High Stack Records, as part time work, running off little more than the pure enjoyment of working with computers and meeting with clients. Although his side project gained momentum slowly but surely, his riskaverse nature kept the company always in the shadows of his full-time work. “My challenge was that I hesitate to take risks because I have a family to think about,” Norm explains. “I kept my business on the side, and my real career always did well.”

In 2000, he put Cyberworx completely on hold in order to focus on the changes happening in his career. After seventeen years of hard work and steady promotion in the United States Postal Service (USPS), advancing from custodian to Sr. Information Systems Specialist, he left to join a colleague in a startup company called Endicia, an internet-based electronic postage service that continues to thrive today. Norm contributed to the technical aspect, acting as an East Coast USPS liaison for the West Coast based company. Working long hours from home, he built the financial interface and internet presence for the company and then left after eighteen months to pursue other opportunities.

“Over the next several years, I wore many hats,” he laughs. “I worked for several different companies and accumulated knowledge, building a name for myself in the industry while maintaining my long term dream of running my own company.” In 2003, Cyberworx was renamed to iSystems Group, Inc. in a strategic move to posture the company for additional capabilities as Norm’s vision solidified into what his business would Norman Fortier

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eventually offer.

In 2006, after climbing the ranks through various executive roles in a variety of work environments, he decided it was at last time to return to iSystems. At the time, he was working as Associate Vice President at a local company; however, his tenure with them was short.

“I was completely taken aback by the lack of ethics at this particular company, which ran in stark contrast to my core values,” he notes. “It ran so contrary to everything I believe in. I can still remember calling my wife, Monica, after my resignation meeting to tell her what happened.

She laughed and didn’t believe me at first because she knows how risk-averse I am. When I convinced her I really had resigned, she asked what I would do, so I said it was time to start my own company. People always said I would do it, and people wanted to work for me.

I said I’d give it six months. At the end of that time, if it didn’t work, I’d go find a job. She was incredibly nervous, but also incredibly supportive.” At last, after years of dreaming, planning, and hard work, Norm had actually jumped off the cliff.

During those six months, Norm supplemented his work on newly-renamed iSystems Group by working on a small project for a company called Buchanan & Edwards. Meanwhile, The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a company influential in the intelligence community but relatively unknown otherwise, reached out and offered him the position of Senior Program Manager. It was an offer he couldn’t turn down, but rather than shutting down iSystems Group, Norm continued to build it as he helped TAC flourish. During his eighteen-month stay with TAC, the company gained recognition and a reputation for its fine work, and Norm himself received customer recognition for his strong leadership and unprecedented contract transition by the Department of Justice. He was ultimately promoted to Director for his efforts, but that wasn’t enough to keep him on his current trajectory. “I liked what I had done for TAC, and I felt I left them in a great position for future success,” he recalls.

“But I wanted to get back to my own company, to build it and live the American Dream.”

Leaving TAC was not the only hard decision to be made in order to fully commit to his company. “It was, and still is, a great company,” he confirms. Around the same time, Norm was offered the position of Senior Manager at Deloitte—along with the highest salary he had ever been offered. Once again, Monica proved to be the greatest support in keeping him on track. “The offer from Deloitte required that we divest iSystems,” Norm explains. “To that, Monica said, ‘You can’t get rid of my company!’” What began as a solo endeavor 46

above his garage was now a matter of deep importance to both of them, so he turned the offer down. “iSystems’s momentum was up, and things were starting to gel,” he affirms. “If I had accepted that offer, my heart wouldn’t have been in it. Even though it was a great company and a great job, I just couldn’t do it, and Monica’s comment was all the validation I needed.”

Along with her support, the success of iSystems can undoubtedly be attributed to Norm’s impermeable integrity and work ethic—traits that run deep through his entire family. Growing up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, his mother worked for and eventually retired from the Department of Motor Vehicles. His father, before his untimely death when Norm was four years old, was a factory worker. “Though I didn’t have much time with him, I knew my father was a hard worker and a handy man,” Norm avows. “He even built the house our family lived in.”

Norm’s mother supported him and his three older siblings by working full-time and with the unconditional support of his grandmother, who lived with the family.

Everyone in the household was very busy with the same strong work ethic. His oldest brother began working when he was thirteen, setting the standard for the other three children to be self-sustaining. “We didn’t work because we thought we had to; in fact, my mother was so skilled at managing her money that the family never felt in want,” Norm remarks. “We worked because that’s just what we knew. It wasn’t a survival thing; it was just engrained in us to get jobs.”

His first jobs, beginning when he turned fourteen, included working on a tobacco farm, a tomato farm, and in a grocery store, yet his dream was to become a pilot. Although his hopes were dashed when he realized he needed glasses, he enlisted in the Air Force straight out of high school, following in the footsteps of his older brother. His military career was cut short, however, when he hyper-extended his knee, requiring full reconstructive surgery and months of rehabilitation. Around that time, he moved to Florida, married his first wife, and began work in demolition construction, contrary to the medical advice from his physician, to support his family.

Growing up, there had been no influence to drive him to pursue college. Although his sister had gone on to become a Registered Nurse, the overall tone of the family was centered upon life experience in the workforce as opposed to academia. Even his uncle, whom he had always looked up to, had only gotten an eighth grade education, yet he had started his own extremely successful air conditioning and plumbing company. It was through construction work, however, that Norm

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

realized he needed to find his direction in life. “They didn’t have medical benefits, the weather was up to 104 degrees, and I realized I didn’t want to do that for my entire life,” he recalls. “It became my motivation to figure my life out.”

Although apprehensive to return to school, he began taking classes at Northwest Florida State College to earn a two-year degree with the financial help of the VA. It was there that he took his first computer programming class and fell in love with it. Soon after, he relocated to New England.

Around this time, his older brother was working as a custodian for the Postal Service. With his sibling’s encouragement, Norm joined at the lowest level, a PS-3—one grade lower than a mail carrier. A year later, when the Postal Service found out he was working on a college degree, he was promoted to be a computer operations worker in the Computer Operations Center.

He graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Information Systems in 1985 from Western New England University. The accomplishment was underscored by the method through which he achieved it, working full time at night and taking a full course load during the day. He slept as time allowed, usually in the late afternoons and early evenings.

Norm was again promoted a short time later to an Information Systems Coordinator in Windsor, CT, where he worked at the Facilities Service Center under Jack Neilsen, who became his mentor. There, he quickly moved up the ranks from EAS-14 to EAS-22, a feat not accomplished by many within the USPS. Headquarters approached him soon after, and he was promoted and relocated to Washington, D.C., where he worked for three more years helping to build the facilities management software used to track and manage all USPS facilities.

Norm committed himself to pursuing the American Dream, and the steady upward progression that defines his professional path has materialized that vision. Now the proud leader of a highly successful company, he strives to create the kind of workplace that promotes engagement and collaboration amongst employees. Much of his leadership philosophy was learned from his boss and mentor, Jack Neilsen, an outstanding professional who was never afraid to laugh at himself. “The key lesson I learned from Jack was to put yourself on the receiving end of what you’re asking a person to do,” he describes.

“He taught me to make my objective clear and help my

employees understand the bigger picture.”

Jack also taught Norm the importance of genuine understanding when an employee experiences strife in personal life. When Norm’s stepfather was struck with illness, Jack allowed him to visit the hospital every day, which made him late for work. When Norm asked his mentor why he permitted it, Jack replied, “Everyone will have a situation like this in his life. You need to know that so you can help someone out if it happens to them.

Everyone will experience some type of situation during their life where they need special treatment or extra time off, just as you needed during your stepfather’s illness.”

When Norm himself became a leader, he found himself saying the same thing to employees when they were faced with adversity.

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Norm emphasizes the role perspective plays in whether an experience is positive or negative. “I try to tell my children that, with everything you do in life, you have two choices,” he advises. “You can choose to turn away from an opportunity if it doesn’t look good, or you can look for the positive effect it has. Make every job, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, an opportunity. Rather than taking on a project with the immediate insight of what it will do in the short term, strive to see how it works into the big picture, or how it builds a certain skill set. I believe everything I did in my past got me where I am today, and everything you do in life will play into who you are later on. It’s not about perceived success; it’s about who you are as an individual.

Everything is an opportunity; you just have to choose to look at it that way.”

Norm himself is living proof of this philosophy.

Having started at the lowest level possible in the Postal Service and rising to nearly the highest, then going on to being founder and CEO of a successful company, he understands the value of patience, persistence, and optimism. He never lost his willingness to work hard, and though he tends to avoid risk, he also understands that jumping off the cliff of the unknown is sometimes what’s needed to truly set your dreams in motion. “We get the best data for decision making through the act of doing,” he affirms. “By working hard, ascending through the ranks, and building your experience and knowledge base, you’ll know when the right time to jump is. It’s that final leap—that ultimate act of doing—that makes your cumulative work experience so worthwhile.

Norman Fortier

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Jeff Gallimore Faith in Business Most prominent businessmen can point to a defining moment in their career—that pivotal experience when their ambitions took shape, or an idea got off the ground, critically defining the direction their professional journey would take. For Jeff Gallimore, though, that defining moment was as personal as it was professional: it was the moment I trusted God. Although Jeff had been raised in the Methodist Church by two religious parents, it wasn’t until his mid-twenties that he developed the deep faith in Jesus Christ that continues to guide his footsteps today. “I was 26,” he recalls, of the transformation. “I had gotten married the year before, adopting my wife’s 13 year old daughter and fathering my first son shortly afterward. Work was going well, but was virtually nonstop, and my wife and I were having financial issues. It was a real struggle, until one day I said, ‘God, take it over. Whatever you want me to do, that’s what I’ll do.’

Those words changed the course of my life.” This new perspective shaped his professional decisions and, in particular, was responsible for his participation in the formation of Excella, the IT consulting company where he currently serves as a partner.

In the summer of 2001, a group of visionaries began discussing the concept that would become Excella; Jeff and his future partners, Steve Cooper and Burton White, were among them. A series of meetings took place, during which each potential partner was asked to assign a percentage to their interest in the project—25 percent committed, 50 percent committed, and so on.

At each meeting, when it came to his turn, Jeff could only reply that he needed to pray on the decision further. He knew in his heart he hadn’t yet received any guidance and wasn’t sure what God wanted of him.

Then one evening, he went out for a run and, returning to his house, distinctly heard a voice in his head. “What would glorify Me?” he remembers the voice asking, and immediately he felt he had been given the guidance from God he’d sought. At the next meeting, he gave his answer with calm conviction: 100 percent.

Eleven years later, Excella is a successful business with over $20 million in revenue and more than 100 employees. The group serves both federal and commercial clients, striving to maintain a balance between the two. “The value of pursuing both sectors is maintaining client diversity,” he explains. “You don’t know where the risks and rewards will be, so you diversify. We’ve seen a lot of companies go under because they’ve bet their whole business on one sector, or even on one client.” The Excella team also thrives on the variety imparted by servicing both federal and commercial clients, growing as a company through its commitment to experiencing different client environments and solving different types of problems.

Through their breadth of experience and excellence in service, the company works with businesses to provide assessment, trainings, and other services to get IT systems—anything from management systems, to inventory, to HR, to financial systems—functioning properly.

Excella’s growth and success since its inception in 2002 has met and surpassed even the partners’ most optimistic projections. Over the first few years, the business’s growth strategy was more or less, “Anything for a buck,” Jeff laughs. “Whatever we could do, we did. Anything related to IT was on the table. We wanted to build relationships, capabilities, and credibility, and we used almost any project we could find as an opportunity to do so.” The strategy worked in terms of getting the company off the ground, but over time, the partners began to reflect on more long-term development and realized the structure of the business had to change. “We were putting people in single-person engagements, so at one point we had ten people at Excella and eleven engagements. There wasn’t a lot of collaboration within the company, and we were getting feedback from our employees that indicated they loved the company and were interested in building it, but they wanted more of a team atmosphere.”

The partners considered Excella’s future from all angles and, in 2006, released a comprehensive “Road Map” which identified six different dimensions to set Jeff Gallimore

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forth the company’s five-year plan. “It laid out what we call DNA elements—the basic building blocks of who we are that would remain fundamentally unchanged,” Jeff explains. “It also expanded on the implications of those DNA elements—things that we had to do more of, or things we had to do differently. It created a moment of clarity for all of our employees, effectively communicating the vision that was in the partner’s heads.” Over the next five years, all the goals on the Road Map were met, and in 2011, the map was officially retired. Then, at the beginning of 2012, Jeff and the other partners, recognizing the need to again focus the company and chart its direction, released Expedition 10, their plan for the next ten years.

Much of Jeff ’s success in business can be attributed to his adaptability and independence—skills honed by a childhood spent following his father on various assignments for the Air Force. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the oldest of four children, Jeff had moved to Germany, Sacramento, and back to Germany again by the time he was only five years old. At age eight, he returned to the United States when his father was stationed at the Pentagon, and when he was thirteen, the Gallimore family moved to Colorado Springs, where Jeff completed high school as valedictorian before enrolling at the University of Virginia (UVa) with hopes to study electrical engineering.

It was there that his career ambitions began to crystallize. During information sessions with the Engineering Department, Jeff realized that electrical engineering might not be where his real interests truly lay. Instead, he found himself fascinated by the Systems Engineering Department. “It was a different kind of engineering than what I had heard of before,” he acknowledges. “It was about problem solving, and sometimes, those problems were very fuzzy. It was a major that could apply to almost anything.” He decided to pursue that track, and the summer after his junior year, Jeff put his newfound skills to work at an IT consulting firm called American Management Systems (AMS). At the end of the summer, having greatly enjoyed the work, the company, and the people, Jeff accepted an offer of full time employment after his graduation from UVa in 1994.

Over the next two years, Jeff continued to enjoy working with AMS, but the tech landscape was rapidly evolving. “There was a prototype project that I had the opportunity to build for one of our clients on a nonbillable basis, and I was totally fascinated with the ability to write this software that ran on the Internet,” he recalls. “You could run it in a browser, and you weren’t 50

dealing with the client server environment anymore.

That just totally fascinated me.” After completing that project, Jeff requested to continue working on Internet projects, but was told he had a different assignment.

After completing that project over the following six months, he repeated his request, but was again denied.

When he received a call from a headhunter several months later, Jeff was eager to explore new options. He ended up joining Perspective Technology Corporation, where he met Steve Cooper, his future partner.

Over the next few years, Perspective Technology Corporation changed drastically, especially when it was acquired by a large company called Accustaff. At first, the Perspective group was left alone. But it was the height of the tech bubble, and Accustaff was acquiring small tech companies, eventually rebranding them as Idea Integration, a large Internet consulting company.

But after the tech bubble burst, the business plan floundered, and things began to change rapidly. “We saw the values and decisions that were coming down from corporate, and we didn’t like them,” Jeff explains.

“I had two options. I could toe the corporate line, because you’re an employee and that’s the role you’re in, and you implement those decisions the best you can.

Or, I could not! I could choose not to be a part of it anymore.”

That fork in the road was one of the many factors that went into starting Excella, and now, Jeff and his team have shown that a small company can achieve excellence and success through committing to consistent, strong values. This mode of operation stands in stark contrast to his experience at Idea Integration, where the company’s original values were left by the wayside in favor of the bigger company mentality. “It became very clear that the best option was to create our own company, establishing the values that we believed were important and making decisions that we felt were consistent with those values,” Jeff affirms. “We can choose what’s right.” Jeff ’s defining moment, when he decided to incorporate faith into his life, made him unable to promote decisions that didn’t align with his values. Thus, Excella was born.

Today, Excella has received awards for its positive work environment—something Jeff is deeply proud of. “That recognition basically says, you’ve created a great place for people to be and to have a career,” he says. “It’s all about taking care of people, and setting ourselves apart in this way is something we’re very proud of.” Perhaps Excella earned these awards for the core philosophy Jeff and his partners have sown into the fabric of its culture, which reads, “Take care of your

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

people. Take care of your clients. The rest takes care of itself.”

Excella also steps outside its internal community to provide aid to the community at large. Their corporate philanthropy program, ImpaX, started by Burton, partners with a local charity called Homestretch, which puts homeless families on the road to self-sufficiency with a two-year plan. At the end of those two years, 85 percent of the families are self-sufficient. Excella employees are encouraged to volunteer not only their money, but also their talents and their time, showing the community that they are, in fact, a business to have faith in.

Jeff ’s emphasis on selflessness derives from his faith, as well as his greatest influences: his mother, father, and wife, Sabrina, whom he praises effusively, calling her his soul mate and noting that, since their marriage in 2007, he has never once removed his wedding ring.

“She makes up for a lot of my weaknesses,” he avows.

“She’s helped me see different perspectives on things.

Throughout my life, I have been very much a rulefollower, very black and white. I don’t like ambiguity. I like being decisive about things, and that doesn’t always serve me well when it comes to dealing with people.

There’s a lot more grey in the world than I would like to admit, and she has helped me see where that grey is.”

With eighteen years in the professional world under his belt—a few before he renewed his faith, many more after—Jeff has hard-won advice to impart to young graduates entering the working world today. “It’s not about you,” he explains. “It’s about the people you live with, work with, and are surrounded by every day. If you’re totally focused on yourself, then you’re missing something. No one can succeed alone. There are a lot of people around you contributing to your success, so recognize that. Life is about relationships.” For someone who began his professional career self-reliant and independent, embracing that truth has been one of the most fulfilling journeys imaginable—a journey that Jeff came to, ultimately, through faith.

Jeff Gallimore

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Michael Goldstein Trial By Fire Though he has been a serial entrepreneur since his college years, Michael Goldstein has recently begun to see himself more as an artist rather than as a scalable businessman. The reason for this shift in selfperception comes not from a new painting hobby, but from the fact that he is doing his craft—free to follow the constant theme of his life, which has been the drive toward value creation.

“I think one of the most helpful questions anyone can ask themselves is, what is my own unique ability?

Where do I fit in? What is that one thing I do better than anyone else on the planet?”

Michael poses. “My unique ability is to get people excited about things—to get them to the table and wanting to participate.”

Through his extensive experience in launching and nurturing businesses, Michael knew his passion and resources belonged at the early stages of a company.

Every time he took a business further down the growth curve, he would feel that yearning to reset and start the next one. Now the founder of Exhilarator, a mutual fund approach to early stage investing that also provides hands-on guidance to help those startups rise above the pack, Michael has lived his life by aiming for that ideal plane of existence where passion, proficiency, and the needs of society intersect.

The seeds of Exhilarator were first sown in 2011, when Michael was spending nights and weekends working with a young entrepreneur he had met while guest lecturing at George Washington University. The young man had just graduated, and Michael brainstormed with him to help lay the foundations for the 22-yearold to start a company called Order Groove. Michael invested both his time and Rolodex in the young man, taking an equity stake in the business and watching it grow from its fledgling stages into a solid business.

“That relationship was pretty inspiring to me because I watched it change both of our lives,” Michael reflects.

“I had had mentors who had helped me, and now I was passing that along. I think great ideas and great people can be created from mentorship, so that’s what I was

striving to practice during my nights and weekends.

But I wanted to be doing more of it, so I found myself wondering: can I make a day job out of helping young aspiring entrepreneurs?”

Michael began to explore that idea in September of 2011. He liked the idea of building a portfolio of startups, working with them hands-on, but he knew he’d need to be sustainable, earning money on a regular basis. He wanted to create what’s termed an accelerator—a firm that affords resources to the most promising startups. He spoke to as many established accelerators as he could find, including TechStar’s 500 startups, Accelerate It in New York, Amplify in LA, Dream It, and Launchbox in DC. He asked what worked for them and what didn’t, and used that input to inform his approach.

Michael then began to think about how his idea would take shape. “I didn’t want to do it the way everyone else was doing it, because that’s not an entrepreneur,” he remarks. “I wanted to do what I thought was pragmatic. The whole thing was going to be a big test, so we decided to structure it as an LLC—an operating entity. We had investors who became part owners of Exhilarator. We built a mechanism where we’d invest $25,000 into startups, get 6 percent equity, and then once they had earned enough capital, we’d take two-thirds of our investment back to pay ourselves for the work we had put in.”

This model proved problematic, however, because Michael found himself unable to execute the twothirds clause with young entrepreneurs who needed the capital more than he did. That’s why, when a friend proposed a fee-for-service model in April of 2012, he decided to give it a shot. His company would help startups with business model refinement, strategy development, resources, introductions, business development, and investor funding, while leaving out the discounted valuation. He would provide those same services to more experienced serial entrepreneurs as well, and secure alternative ongoing revenue that way. “Under this model, we’re able to Michael Goldstein

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guarantee that 100 cents of each investor dollar goes into those startups and buying that company stock, as opposed to overhead,” Michael explains. “And in return, I have equity in the overall pie. Everyone has a piece, and there isn’t a management fee. Their initial investment is probably bigger than the average mutual fund, but they’re getting in at a tenth of the valuation that angel investors are getting in at, which more than offsets that difference.”

Today, this operation is Exhilarator, and it has proven more than sustainable: so far, two of the four companies they’re working with have raised additional capital at a much higher valuation than what they got in at. “My evaluation of any business model is, are people willing to wait in line for what you’re offering?”

Michael explains, of his approach. “When holding my current business to that standard, it works. And we’re not only maintaining; we’re also generating returns for our investors, all just buying time for portfolio companies to exit.” Michael and his team have done four equity and four pay-per-service operations so far, with 18 investors supplying a minimum of $25,000 each. “Our investors make money two ways—through the ratcheting up of Exhilarator, which they own a piece of, and then through the distributions from each individual portfolio company,” Michael continues. “It’s a new and interesting way to structure our business, and as the leader of a startup liaison, I’m really in my element, helping businesses grow and young entrepreneurs succeed.”

In a sense, Michael has had some inkling of his destiny since he was seven years old growing up in College Park, Maryland. Even from that early age, he was intrigued by moneymaking schemes and opportunities. “Collecting stamps really interested me, and I’d go buy stamps at the local mall for a penny apiece,” he remembers. “I liked the unknown of it— that I might be paying a little and selling for a lot. I would deal stamps to my friends.”

Michael’s father, an attorney with his own real estate law firm who lived vicariously through his children to pursue his own entrepreneurial passions, got his son business cards that read, “Michael A. Goldstein, Stamp Dealer.” When Michael would look at those cards, he knew he would be an entrepreneur and start his own company someday.

Michael’s grandfather also had a stamp auction business, which Michael was peripherally involved in. He kept 3 x 5 cards with the addresses of everyone he invited to the auctions, and when he purchased a computer, he hired his 10-year old grandson to find a 54

list management program and digitize his mailing list.

The youngest of three, Michael always had a paper route and would sell things door to door in his neighborhood. In high school, he was interested in environmental technology, like showerheads that reduced water flow and other industrial products that weren’t typically used in houses in the 1980s.

He decided to put together a catalogue, and asked manufacturers to send him information so he could pick and choose items for inclusion based on what was best for the environment, and what would work best in the home. Though he ultimately didn’t have time to execute the project, the exercise honed his ability to foresee hot button issues and devise innovative solutions to problems even before they arose.

It wasn’t all business and no play for Michael, however. His family took a trip to Africa when he was ten, which, along with a study abroad experience later in Spain, combined to cultivate in Michael a keen appreciation for other cultures and ways of life.

He also remembers warmly the countless nights his father spent putting together photograph albums for his children. It wasn’t until many years later when Michael’s own young son, Oliver, came across the albums, that Michael understood just how meaningful the gesture really was.

Michael attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a science and technology school in Maryland, and Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, was in his class.

“At Roosevelt, it was cool to be smart,” he reflects. He then went on to Boston University, opting to major in environmental policy to expand his knowledge base and stay well-rounded and multi-dimensional while never losing sight of his lifelong ambition to own his own business.

He wasted no time in realizing that ambition, launching a business selling cinderblocks to students as they moved into their dorm rooms so they could loft their beds for extra storage space. Around that time, he also read a news article about William Haney III, a student who started a business selling firewood at Harvard because their dormitories have working fireplaces. He had then started a company called Molten Metal, which he took public, and Michael, driven by his affinity for William’s story, sought out the company and applied for a job.

The Head of the HR Department explained that the company’s stock prices were dropping and that they were on a hiring freeze, but Michael insisted on telling her his story and why he was passionate about working there. At the end, however, the woman said,

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

“Do you really want to work for someone else?”

“She caught me,” Michael laughs. “I realized I didn’t want to work for anyone else, and I never applied for another job.” Instead, he invested his tireless energy into the cinderblock business, which, by its second year in operation, was facing some competition.

Other students, inspired by his success, prepared to run cinderblock operations of their own, so Michael acquired a Hawkers & Peddlers license from the city of Boston for $2 so he could sell legitimately on the streets. “That fall, as other people began setting up shop along Commonwealth Avenue, I called the police, who came and shut them all down,” Michael says with a smile. “I then hired those students to deliver blocks for me for a small profit.”

All in all, Michael sold truckloads of blocks, taking his business across Boston and then nationwide to 22 different school. When he graduated, he faced a big decision: should he go out and get a job, or should he continue being an entrepreneur? Was it a better strategic move to go learn an industry before doing your own thing, or to opt for trial by fire? True to form, Michael chose trial by fire.

Michael returned to DC, where his father had always dreamed of opening a consignment store. The two decided to focus on selling furniture, which they got from manufacturers on consignment and sold at half price. They grew the business to around $500,000 a year, and then decided to franchise it, but when Michael sat down to review the franchise documents, he noticed they were drawn for ten-year contracts. “It was 1998, and I realized I’d be in the retail business until 2008,” he recalls. “There was no way I was going to do that, so we sold the store and broke even.”

Not long afterward, Michael was reading The New Yorker magazine and noticed an advertisement for a Spice of the Month Club, where members were mailed a different spice each month. He found himself wishing he could have a different magazine each month in an issue of his interest, and got the idea to open a business called Magazine of the Month.

“This was a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing,” he readily confesses. Before he had even laid the groundwork for the idea, a catalogue expressed interest, saying it wanted to include offers for Magazine of the Month in 3.5 million copies of its holiday issue. “I didn’t know if I could actually pull it off,” he says. “I would need twelve different magazines to participate, all of them in competition with each other because they focused on the same issue. I approached publishers to ask if they wanted to be involved, and no one said yes. Then,

when I changed the way I pitched it, everyone started signing up.”

The company was an instant hit, and Michael found himself traveling to New York to meet with publishers and becoming an expert at magazine circulation. Magazine of the Month was so successful that Magazines.com flew up from Nashville to talk to Michael about acquiring it. He originally agreed to work with them on a joint venture, which turned into a sale that left Michael with $1.3 million and a twoyear employment contract. “That deal was definitely a highlight,” he remembers. “However, it was a tough cultural fit, and the deal ended in a lawsuit.”

Once the headaches of that agreement subsided, Michael spent three months “mind mapping” to help determine his next venture. He had developed an unparalleled expertise in the sale of online subscriptions, and he decided he wanted to build a platform for a digital subscription agent. With that, after raising money, building out the platform, and addressing some challenges, DealPal was launched.

From the company, customers could purchase hardware like DVD players, just as they could at Amazon.com or in a store like Best Buy. At DealPal, however, they also had the option of purchasing a bundle that included the product, as well as a service like a Netflix subscription, at a discounted rate.

Because they had deals with these service providers that allowed them to subsidize the product price to incentivize customers to buy, the site began to enjoy impressive traffic. “The great thing was that we were in charge of our own destiny,” Michael recalls. “The drawback was that it was a consumer facing business, and we hadn’t accounted for customer acquisition costs.

By the time DealPal raised $2.2 million, Michael decided they would either go big or sell. He floated it to some interested parties and sold it to XL Marketing, which was run by a friend of his, David Steinberg.

Michael continued working there for a year and then left to start Exhilarator, which David invested in and became a partner of. “It was such a different experience than the sale of Magazine of the Month because it was a much better cultural fit,” he explains.

“That first acquisition ended in a lawsuit, but the second ended in a stronger friendship, partnership, and a new business relationship.”

As a leader, Michael first distinguishes what’s important, where he intends to go, and why. He then focuses on conveying that information to all relevant parties, and then constantly motivating those parties to Michael Goldstein

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use their unique abilities to drive toward that common goal. “I let my passion drive leadership because people are attracted to energy and excitement,” he avows.

“It’s also critical that a leader pays attention to detail, to what’s actually going to get things done, because people want to be onboard with people who know what they’re doing.”

Through this extensive series of risk and reward, Michael credits his wife, Helena, for her support and love. “Going through life with a trial by fire attitude can be intense, and she’s been a great stabilizing influence on me,” Michael explains. “She’s been very involved in the businesses, and I value her opinion more than anyone’s because she has my best interests at heart 100 percent of the time. With two young sons at home, life can be crazy at times, but we’re partners.

We’re in it forever.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Michael poses the same question that has led him to success over the years: what’s your unique

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ability? “75 percent of the time, people say what they want it to be, not necessarily what it is,” he remarks.

“That’s a tendency of successful business people, to rewrite history the way they want it to be. It takes a real exercise in honesty and self-evaluation to identify what you’re really good at, not how you want people to view you.”

Beyond that honesty, Michael reflects on a quote that Steve Jobs adopted after coming across it at the end of a catalogue: stay foolish and stay hungry. “To me, hungry means focused and aggressive,” Michael remarks. “Foolish means a whimsical ability to look beyond certain things. The juxtaposition of those two qualities is fascinating to me, and at their intersection, there’s a lot of value to be made. I think that’s where people are happiest—when they can balance the whimsical foolishness that keeps them light and happy with their need to succeed and make a living. So try to figure out where that intersection is, and play in that space.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Tim Green The Mission-Driven Mind Tim Green was leadership material before his acceptance to West Point, but it was the academy and his subsequent years with the military that shaped, trained, and focused him. “Everything during that time frame was aimed at developing me as a leader,” he explains today. “By the time I was 27, I was leading organizations of 1,500 people.”

Diverging sharply from the environment of a private corporation, the military gave Tim the opportunity to lead from a young age, providing him with the resources to find the strengths he later put to use as an executive in the business world. “I really enjoyed working with soldiers,” he recalls. “I was part of the all-volunteer force, and everybody was there because they wanted to be there.

They were driven by the mission. And it was always amazing to me that you could take all these people from different walks of life and get them moving in the same direction with that mission. Race, color, creed, religion, gender, height, weight—it didn’t matter. I had the opportunity to see what a group of people was really capable of, and I never forgot it.” Indeed, this emphasis on building a team, and of consolidating that team behind a common goal, made Tim uniquely qualified to lead organizations as he moved out into the private sector.

Since his time in the military, Tim has worked with four different business owners as they attempted to grow their companies and incorporate outside management.

He has also worked with larger businesses, deftly adapting to each new challenge by assessing the needs of the group and the priorities of the owner. “Those four situations were very different, but they had some elements that were similar,” he observes. “I began to understand that those leaders got to where they are today by being who they are, and I wasn’t going to change that, so I had to be able to adapt.”

Wielding this leadership experience and cultivated business savvy, Tim today serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Centuria Corporation, a government contractor that provides technical services that center around IT, science, and engineering. Founded in

2002 by veteran Kevin Burke, the group has grown steadily over the past ten years. Now comprised of 180 employees and 50 subcontractors spread from New Hampshire out to Phoenix, Arizona, Centuria brought in a little over $30 million in revenue in 2011, and as a result of its growth, its upcoming challenge will be the transition from competing for service-disabledveteran-owned small-business contracts to free and open competition. “We’ve been preparing for this for a few years,” Tim explains. “It’s something you can’t leave to the last minute, but we hope to avoid the dip backwards that is common in this industry and instead maintain our current growth trends.”

Tim joined Centuria in 2009, when Kevin, at the helm of a rapidly expanding venture, realized it was time to bring in an outside management team. “It’s a huge thing for an owner, particularly a sole owner, to bring in an outside team,” Tim points out. “It’s one of the most significant changes an owner ever has to make, when he starts to share leadership with another individual. I think the fact that I had experienced that kind of responsibility before gave him the degree of comfort he was looking for. I’m able to see what an organization needs from me and to provide it, and that’s what Kevin needed.” After hiring Tim as COO, Kevin went on to add an executive Vice President for Sales, as well as a CFO. Judging from the ease of his assimilation into Centuria, it comes as no surprise that Tim hails from a large yet meticulously managed family. His parents, after raising four biological daughters of their own, decided to adopt a son, making Tim their first adoptive child at seven months of age. He was soon joined by nine more adoptive siblings over the course of the next decade—a situation that made for a uniquely educational childhood. “We all had to find a way to get along,” Tim recalls. “There were a lot of strong personalities in the house, and you sort of inherently had to think from the perspective of ‘what’s going to be best for the family?’ instead of ‘what’s going to be best for me?’ Developing this kind of thinking really came Tim Green

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in handy later in my military career, where we had to see the world from the perspective of the mission. We all had jobs and responsibilities from an early age, and the household was actually very well ordered. We had a pretty tight schedule with little deviation.”

Adopting ten children was virtually unheard of in the 1960s and 1970s, yet Tim’s mother’s was motivated to provide a loving home to orphan children after emerging from her own troubled youth. Orphaned at a young age when her Cherokee mother and wealthy father both passed away during a flu epidemic in the 1930s, she was unwanted by her extended family due to her mixed race. Her father’s family sheltered her until they were granted legal access to her inheritance and then promptly abandoned her with nothing. Taken in by a distant aunt in Colorado, she met Tim’s father and settled in the region, but the memories of her time shuttling between unwelcoming relatives never left her.

The Greens had already taken in four sons when an agency contacted them and asked them to consider taking in a child with special needs. “Of course it was all over after that,” Tim smiles. “My mother went down there and ended up launching a process where they ended up adopting six more kids, each with a physical, mental, or emotional challenge. I think that, if my mother could have adopted everyone, she probably would have. I’m sure I got some of my mission orientation from observing her passion and commitment as well.”

Though Tim’s parents were clearly compassionate and generous, the sheer number of kids in the house kept Tim from ever being spoiled by that generosity.

By the time of Tim’s adoption, his father was running his own construction company. It was a successful business, but with 14 mouths to feed, there was little extra cash to go around. Informing the adaptability that Tim would later use to provide the right sort of individualized management for a variety of owners and businesses over the years, his parents did not have a prescribed path for each child. College was on the docket for some, but not others—it all depended on the child’s wants and needs. “Not everybody worked in the family—it depended on our goals,” Tim affirms. “I never worked while I was going to school, but a couple of my brothers did. I wanted to go to college, so school was more important than a job. My parents had me focused on stuff that would keep school a number one priority.”

Reaching one’s goals was about more than just effort, however. Tim can still remember the day in seventh grade when his father pulled him aside and said, “Tim, 58

I understand you want to go to college. I absolutely want you to do that, but we need to figure out how we’re going to pay for it, because you’ve got a bunch of brothers and sisters that don’t have the same advantages you do. You’ve got a full set of faculties, fingers, and toes, and not all of your brothers and sisters have that, so they’re going to need more support. Because of that, I can’t pay for you to go to college, so we’re going to have to figure out another way to get you there.” It was after this conversation that Tim first became interested in the Army. His father had served during World War II and supported the interest, and a guidance counselor in high school introduced him to a former student and current West Point cadet who pushed him to consider the academy.

Tim’s acceptance came as no surprise to teachers who’d watched him ace every class in high school.

School hadn’t always been smooth sailing, however.

In sixth grade, his poor performance had actually landed him on probationary status. His counselor’s recommendation to transfer him to a remedial school, along with his mother’s focused “encouragement” all summer, lit a fire under Tim and led him to work hard in school for the first time—a watershed moment he considers to have been a real turning point. “I went into seventh grade, and my only motive was to get straight A’s so that I could turn around and say ‘I told you so,’” Tim laughs. “I was angry and wanted to get straight A’s to show everybody I could do it.” He did, in fact, succeed in his quest, and by the end of the year, he was enrolled in a summer camp for gifted and talented students—an experience that kindled in him an appreciation for doing well and doing one’s best.

This appreciation for his gifts, and the realization that he had a responsibility to use them as best he could, has led Tim to perform exceptionally throughout his career. In fact, among his proudest accomplishments came during an almost unbelievable turnaround in New Orleans, where he had been hired as COO of a subsidiary that had been launched several years before.

“It was a small business award, but it was a billion dollar blanket purchase agreement, and they were expecting in their first year to do $60 million,” Tim recalls. Instead, they’d hit only $40 million, much to the chagrin of the customer and corporation alike.

On his first day, Tim walked into an organization with 300 employees and no intermediate management.

The existing protocol had him meeting with each employee each morning to provide instruction—a practice that was as unsustainable as it was impossible.

With that, Tim took on the task of creating an internal

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

structure that facilitated operation and eliminated micromanagement. After his changes, he received twenty direct reports, with the rest of the employees reporting to those twenty employees. “Over time, we rationalized the enterprise and skinned it down,” he explains. “After getting everything straightened out, we went from $40 million to $80 million that year. When I left four years later, the company was doing over $100 million in revenue. There were six division managers and a whole new crop of customers. The thing was firing on all eight cylinders, and it was really a situation where I could stand back and say, wow, I really had an impact here.”

In advising young college graduates looking to follow in his footsteps and be successful in the business world today, Tim stresses the importance of pursuing excellence. “No matter what job you have, do the best you can,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what it is. In fact, it all starts with the job you have right now. Are you absolutely doing the best job you can right here?” A lesson Tim learned in 6th grade, it has served him well ever since. Beyond that, he emphasizes the importance of giving. “Be generous with your time, your knowledge, and whatever else you have the opportunity to give,” he says. “If you can adopt that mindset, everything else will fall into place.”

This mantra is expressed in Centuria’s philosophy of giving back, which is a foundational element to its company culture. “One of our biggest efforts has taken shape over the last several years as we’ve really ramped up our veteran hiring,” Tim points out. “When I got there, the percentage of veterans in our workforce was

low, at 3 percent. Now, however, we’re approaching 20 percent.” Centuria is also very active in Veteranowned-business support organizations like NVSBC, the National Veterans’ Small Business Coalition. And, again exemplifying his emphasis on adaptability and on understanding that solutions must be tailored to situations, Tim prefers local initiatives over national ones. “We really believe in the adage that ‘support begins at home,’ so we defer to our program managers to support programs that mean something to the local workforce,” he describes. “For example, out in Oklahoma, we’ve got about thirty or forty employees, and we support a range of activities like Meals on Wheels and a program called Christmas in April, where teams go out and build, repair, and refurbish homes. A lot of what we do philanthropically doesn’t have a big national sticker on it because we’re trying to figure out something that is most meaningful for our teams on the ground, wherever they may be.”

And what is most meaningful to Tim? The mission, of course. From his family, to the military, to the various businesses and owners he has supported, he has changed his focus and adapted himself to advance the mission of the group. “When you want something, and you start working towards it, things fall into place,” he affirms. “By keeping your heart and mind aligned with that mission, those things will stay in place.” By holding true to a leadership style that is driven by the mission in this way, Tim’s example demonstrates that astute orientation and big-picture thinking keep one’s feet on the right path and one’s mind on the right message, whatever may come.

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Jorge Haddock Bridging the Gap Dr. Jorge Haddock and his family often joke that the first complete sentence out of his mouth as a toddler was, “I’m going to be an engineer.”

True to his word, he never lost sight of that dream— until a passion for the humanities and social sciences, as well as a broken heart in his sophomore year of college, threw him from the track he had always envisioned for himself. For a time, he questioned his dream of becoming an engineer.

The following year, however, Jorge traveled from his home island of Puerto Rico to New York City for the first time at the invitation of a friend and experienced the moment that would define the rest of his life. Looking at the Brooklyn Bridge, the first steelwire suspension bridge that has allowed millions upon millions of travelers to cross the East River since its completion in 1883, Jorge felt something inside him click. “I was reminded that that magnificent bridge was built by engineers, and I was reminded of my dream,” he relays. “I knew I needed to restart my life right away, so I cut my vacation short by a week. I went back home, and my life was never the same.”

With that newfound sense of resolve, Jorge threw himself into the pursuit of his dream with more dedication than ever before. It was enough to bridge the gap of the time he had lost, propelling him through graduation and later to earn his masters at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the school where John A. Roebling, creator of the wire rope suspension design of the Brooklyn Bridge, received his own engineering training. Now the Dean of the School of Management at George Mason University in Northern Virginia, Jorge remembers the bridge as a symbol of the struggle he overcame, and of those struggles he strives to help others overcome as well.

“I think most people pursue a career in education because they’re passionate about other people’s success,” he says today. “Seeing others succeed makes people like me thrive.” Under his leadership, George Mason’s School of Management has advanced its reputation

of excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and service. Through its programs, students receive topnotch education in the classroom, and co-curricular and extracurricular activities like internships, professional clubs, business plan competitions, and business trips abroad that complement their coursework in marketing, accounting, finance, information systems and operations management, and general management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. What’s more, the school’s approach is global in scope and vision, with students from over a hundred countries represented in the student body of 4,500. Faculty, administrators, and students strive not only to produce the highest quality research and scholarship to advance the academic community, but also to participate in service that betters the community at large.

Prior to Jorge’s arrival in 2009, Dean Richard Klimoski had helped the school to grow as the demand for business education at the undergraduate and graduate levels lent it an international reputation. After his tenure, the school was looking for new energy and new ideas, and Jorge had the experience and skills to meet its five goals of improving its rankings, increasing the research output of its faculty, hiring more research-oriented faculty members, improving the student experience at all levels, and increasing its reputation through centers of excellence. “I have always been known as studentcentered,” Jorge affirms. “I’ve also generated a lot of research myself through my career and have had success in bringing that focus to institutions through my leadership, so it was a good fit.”

When Jorge came onboard as Dean, the school’s undergraduate programs were ranked 88 out of 1,700 business programs in the U.S. and 13,000 programs globally. Today, after only three years of Jorge’s leadership, that ranking has risen 16 spots to 72.

Additionally, the school’s graduate programs were not ranked at all when he arrived. Now, its part-time MBA and online MBA are both ranked at number 59.

Their professors receive their doctorates from the best Jorge Haddock

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institutions worldwide, and the strong reputation of its faculty has allowed the school to achieve a local, national, and even global renown.

Jorge’s success today seems so solid that it’s hard to imagine him in another environment, but growing up in a lower middle-class household in Caguas, Puerto Rico, his future was anything but certain.

His parents divorced when he was four, so he and his sisters were raised primarily by their mother, a teacher with steadfast grace and quiet optimism even in the face of hardship. His father was a veteran of the Korean War who held a number of odd jobs, including entrepreneurial ventures, a position at a sugar cane processing plant, and a stint as a salesman.

Some of his father’s entrepreneurial spirit rubbed off on the young boy, and when Jorge was ten years old, he began peeling potatoes in the back of the local supermarket with his neighbor to earn a little money.

“I loved it!” he recalls. “I loved working.” Later, he got a newspaper route. “I was the happiest guy alive,” he laughs. Then, when he was thirteen, a law was passed that allowed children to work in order to keep them off the street. With that, he got a job at a men’s clothing store, where he sold suits and ties and helped colorcoordinate for customers.

Jorge always loved sports, and in both athletics and the classroom, he often found himself a reluctant leader amongst his peers. In high school, his sister wanted to play basketball, but the team needed a coach. He volunteered and ended up leading the team to win the state championship. “I think it was natural for me to lead because, for me, there’s a big difference between leadership and control,” he remarks. “When you’re controlling, you tend to play smaller games because you can’t control a big game. Leaders, then, tend to play bigger games because it’s about a purpose that’s bigger than him or her. For me, it’s always been about trying to see people in their greatness—in their strengths, and not their weaknesses. That’s why, when they needed someone to lead, I was often chosen.”

Like many children, Jorge was deeply influenced by his mother, but it was not a disciplinarian or chiding nature that compelled him to seek success in life.

Rather, it was her grace, strength, and enduring love.

“Studies show that the most significant factor for kids to be successful in college is the level of education of their mothers,” he remarks. “My mom got a master’s degree at a time when few women did, but that isn’t why I was so committed to succeeding. Rather, it was that I didn’t have the heart to fail her.”

Jorge was also profoundly impacted by his 62

grandparents and two uncles, who were very present in his life after the divorce of his parents. “My grandfather was a waiter but still managed to send three children to college,” he says. “Perhaps for the first time in history, people are now questioning the value of a college education, but it’s why I’m here today.” He’s also here today because one uncle, an engineer, served as a role model and taught by example, while another uncle, an accountant, always went out of his way to find teaching moments for Jorge as a boy. The influence of these strong adults was clearly at play when, in ninth grade, Jorge’s unwavering dream of becoming an engineer gained deeper nuance as he realized he felt drawn toward teaching as well. He decided he’d become an engineer and then do pro-bono teaching at a high school, enjoying the best of both worlds. Later, however, he decided a better route would be becoming an engineering professor.

The University of Puerto Rico is notorious for its low acceptance rate, and the Haddock family couldn’t afford the more costly alternatives, so Jorge’s mother always impressed upon him the importance of working hard with his future in mind. It was also the only university with an engineering program, so it was his only chance.

He earned a 4.0 through high school and scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on his standardized tests, and his tenacity paid off. He was admitted to the University of Puerto Rico, where he also served as the assistant women’s basketball coach.

Jorge struggled initially in college because the public schools had failed to prepare him well for the challenges of higher education, but he earned a 3.3 for his first semester and showed he had what it took. His second year was a struggle, but by his third year, his discipline and work ethic were unleashed at full force, and he began to scale the peak toward the potential that was always latent within him. “I decided I would be like a stake in the ground—nothing could move me from my commitment,” he remembers. “I was extremely organized, to the point that my friends would study off of my notebooks instead of the actual textbooks. I would go to sleep at 10:30 at night when everyone else was starting to study, and I’d get up at 6:00 AM even if I didn’t have class. Success was about staying with my system even when everyone else was at a different wavelength.”

Thanks to his systematic discipline, Jorge earned enough credits to graduate from his five-year program a semester early, but thanks to divine intervention or the fact that it didn’t make sense to start his graduate studies in the spring, he stayed at the University of

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Puerto Rico to kill time by taking a few more classes.

It was that February that he met Maria, the beautiful second-year student that would become his wife of 33 years and counting.

After earning his masters from Rensselaer and then his doctorate from Purdue University, Jorge returned to the University of Puerto Rico briefly to teach but found that he missed the research culture of the universities state side. After having their first child, Jorge and Maria faced the difficult choice of moving back to the Mainland. They lived down the street from Maria’s parents at the time, and their daughter was the family’s only grandchild, but the couple made the hard decision to leave and remained pillars of support for one another through the hard transition.

Jorge landed a position at Clemson University, and then went on to spend two decades as a tenured, full professor at Rensselaer, pushing the envelope of his abilities to be the best teacher he could be for the best students he could ask for. Through this period, he initially focused in operations research with mathematical models and optimization—an inherently interdisciplinary field that led him to naturally transition over to management later on at Rensselaer.

“During that time, it was hard for assistant professors to get tenure, and many came to me for mentorship,” he recalls. “I was able to help them, which led me to the realization that I could expand my impact by teaching those that taught students, thereby having a compounding effect. Thus, I became an educator because I’m committed to the success of not only my students, but also my colleagues.”

Jorge enjoyed the teaching and research he was doing so immensely that he hesitated when Rensselaer offered him the position of Associate Dean. He had started a modest consulting company as well and loved the freedom of his current lifestyle, but decided to test the waters of the offer, loving the experience so much that he served in that capacity for two years. He then transitioned to the University of Richmond to serve as the Dean of the School of Business for four years before accepting the position at George Mason.

Through the evolution of his career, Jorge’s leadership philosophy has grown deeply perceptive of the line that separates ego from vision. “When you find yourself in a leadership position, it’s important to remember what guides you,” he stresses. “We talk about the values of integrity and honesty, but we’re also guided in daily life by our egos—our modes of survival. Everyone

survives differently, and most of the time we’re guided by the ego, but effective leaders tend to be the ones that are guided by a purpose and a vision. They’re able to distinguish between what I like to do versus what I have to do. Theoretically, it sounds simple enough to discern between your ego and your vision, but when you’ve got a board, customers, employees, investors, and competition all threatening your survival, it can be very hard. The key is to come together to find a common sense of purpose and to create something bigger than ourselves that can serve others, not the ego.”

Quick to espouse the importance of keeping one’s guiding vision at the forefront of the mind, Jorge never loses sight of the fact that everything he does is for the well-being of his students. At each institution he’s served, he has been a constant reminder of this guiding principle. Indeed, while Jorge counts his family as his greatest success, his legacy extends to each and every student he’s touched, whether directly or indirectly.

Though he and Maria do some anonymous service work, and though he has served on the Chamber of Commerce and on several nonprofit boards, Jorge still dedicates the vast majority of his time to serving the profession simply because it’s for the good of the university and, ultimately, the students.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Jorge reminds students that life is about pursuing your passion and your dream while keeping your mind on your principles. “That’s nothing novel or earth-shattering, but it’s important,” he says. “Be true to yourself. Also, don’t assume that you deserve anything. Love and respect should be earned so that it is truly valued. We begin life with nothing and leave with nothing, and in between we should have what we earn.”

Today, when he tries to put his finger on the important influences that have shaped his life along the way, Jorge finds himself almost speechless. “There have been so many,” he says. “So many great professors, department chairs, deans, presidents, colleagues, mentors, and role models that helped bridge the gap from who I was to who I became. It is for them, and for all those students today hoping to reach their own potential, that I work to bring the best designs, the strongest materials, and the biggest dreams to the table, so that each young person can find themselves on a Brooklyn Bridge of their own and wake up to the future they know they can attain.

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Babak Hafezi Avenues of Efficiency, Highways to Success When Babak Hafezi was only two years old, his once-affluent family fled to Austria to escape the violent revolution destroying their home in Iran. They were only able to bring a little money, but his parents were smart enough to pack a few valuable items.

Entrepreneurs by nature, they used those limited means to open a restaurant.

It was a huge restaurant with a ballroom space, capable of seating five hundred people. Yet, while it began as a success, its initial tide of good fortune soon waned, and the business became a financial drain on the family. “My father didn’t know the Austrian market and didn’t speak German,” Babak explains.

“None of his partners knew anything about the restaurant business. Because of all his successes in Iran, he had been confident he could manage it, but he simply didn’t have enough information to succeed.” For the second time in just five years, his family lost everything and was forced to move to Spain, where the cost of living was more manageable.

Despite the financial and cultural hardships they faced, the Hafezis were fast learners and hard workers, which eventually allowed them to achieve a stable lifestyle again. Babak, however, never forgot how wrought with strife his parents’ path to normalcy had been. With his past in mind, he made it his life’s work to create avenues of efficiency for both international and domestic businesses and individuals alike, ensuring that each person he served left with the information they needed to succeed.

Today, Babak is the CEO and founder of HafeziCapital International Consulting and Investing, a company focused on improving businesses from four angles.

The first is through internationalization, as inspired directly by his parents’ experience in Austria, Australia, and Spain. An American company, for instance, will come to HafeziCapital wanting to learn how to move into a foreign market, which can easily lead to failure if not done with care. “Every market is different, so it’s important to understand the cultural nuances of market entry,” Babak explains.

The second angle is focused on helping technology companies learn how to package themselves to gain more capital, be it a company in its infancy or a mature company that now needs venture capital or private equity. The last two angles, more focused on consulting, entail helping companies that have problems with structure or foundation reorganize, and helping companies who have stopped growing. By addressing success from these four key vantage points, Babak is committed to engendering growth, organization, and capitalization for each and every client.

Babak was born in Iran to an upper class family shortly before the Iranian Revolution of 1979. “My mother’s family was part of the Thousand Families,” he explains. “Every country has a group of a thousand families that sort of influence the country. My father was a very well respected and influential banker.” Despite the family riches, both parents were committed to their professional lives. His father earned two bachelor’s degrees, and both parents worked prestigious jobs for the Iranian Central Bank. They also saw themselves as entrepreneurs, always working on side ventures apart from their full-time jobs.

“Education is a strong value in my family, as well as in Iranian culture as a whole. In an Iranian household, if you get an A minus, they don’t congratulate you, but rather ask you why you did not get an A. The bar is always set to perfection,” he notes. “Education was always an integral part of our lives. None of my Iranian friends have less than a master’s degree, and many have two. I knew I would never get the approval of my family and Iranian society without an education. If you didn’t have education, you couldn’t marry someone in your own class, and respect was impossible to gain. If you had a degree, elders listened to you. If not, they ignored you. It was just what our community required of us.”

Babak’s time in his birth country was cut short by the onset of the revolution, which he has little memory of.

“The situation was so bad in Iran that you essentially didn’t know who your friends were anymore. All you had was your immediate family,” he recalls gravely.

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“Peoples’ lives were torn apart. Those who didn’t have much would claim your assets, and you had no way to protect yourself, so we lost all our wealth. Most of the thousand families fled the country. If you couldn’t sell your land before the revolution, you lost it, which hardly mattered because everything lost its real value during the revolution.” The Hafezis move to Austria and then to Spain allowed them to manage their cost of living more effectively. What’s more, the culture in Spain was similar to that of Iran, so it was an easy and welcome transition for the family, though Babak continued to attend Die Deutsche Schule, a German school in Madrid.

Babak was seven when the family arrived in Spain, and after five years, his parents decided to move to Australia, hoping to give Babak the opportunity to learn English. They had heard that most Iranians who traveled directly to Australia after the revolution loved their new homes, but Babak and his family had not predicted the tremendous culture shock that ensued, so they quickly left for the United States, which proved to be a better fit for them overall.

The family lived happily in Virginia for several years until 1992, when Babak returned alone to Madrid for boarding school. A few months later, his parents decided to return to Iran to tend to one of their old businesses that the government finally decided to hand back over to them. Before fleeing the country, Babak’s father had been the majority shareholder of the premier private school for women called Marjan, and now that it was his again, he flew to Iran, intending to return to the U.S. within six months but instead remaining indefinitely.

With his parents too far away to support him, Babak returned to the United States from boarding school and moved in with his uncle. When his uncle married, however, Babak found himself cast out. He had no choice but to live out of his car for a few months as he worked four jobs and took full-time night classes.

Babak went to a community college for two years and earned a full-ride scholarship to American University, where he earned both his Bachelors of Arts in international studies and his Masters in international peace and conflict resolution in three years. During his time at American University, he began to DJ as a means to support himself. At first, he stuck with small events, but it was only a matter of time before he was being invited to perform globally. “Clients would invite me to retreats, and they would pay for everything,” Babak smiles. “I was able to work hard in school during the week, then DJ around the world on weekends, making money and having fun.”

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After graduation, he took his LSATs in the hopes that he could return to American University to attain his law degree and pursue a career in international law.

He was waitlisted, however, and continued to work on improving his scores. While American denied him, he was accepted to New York University and he decided to enroll.

Shortly before Babak’s move to New York City, his parents came to visit him for the second time in twelve years. Sadly, his father, was suffering from a heart condition, which quickly deteriorated during the month they were with him, and he passed away.

Babak was devastated, and after going through law school orientation, he realized he was not mentally or emotionally prepared for the combative nature of the program. He had already taken a year off since attaining his masters, so he instead decided to call American University’s business school and explain that he wanted a spot in the class. Though he was long past the deadline for applying, the school looked at his grades and accepted him, and within twenty four hours of making the call, he was enrolled.

“I started at business school part time to see if I’d like it, and I quickly realized it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Babak confides. “It was so much more team oriented. It taught me to work with people and was perfect for my communication skills, while also making me very independent. Business school forced me to become an extravert and share the social aspects of my life with others. We forget that business transactions are social interactions. Business school is where I belonged, I just didn’t know it.”

While working on his MBA, Babak continued to DJ to support himself. His mother had returned to Iran temporarily to continue supervising the family business.

Within a few years, she returned to Washington to be near Babak and lived semi-independently, which served as an additional motivator to work hard. “My mom has nieces and nephews who are still in Iran,” he notes. “I want to bring those children here for her.

I want to better my life and those of the people around me. I want to give those kids the same, if not better, opportunities than I have had. ” During his time in business school, Babak realized he wanted to be an entrepreneur like his father, rather than work for a big organization. When he graduated in 2008, the economy was in such a state that there was little hiring going on anyway, so Babak decided he would create his own job. “Our vision was to take on businesses having trouble in the market, identify their weaknesses, clean them up, and make them more

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

effective in the business world so that they could be sold off in 3 to 5 years,” Babak explains. “We shared that business idea and obtained $25 million in committed capital, with the promise that after we had the company in motion, we would get up to $100 million more.”

With the healthy head-start they were given, Babak and his new business, HafeziCapital International Consulting and Investing, found several companies to begin the due diligence process. The unstable economy, however, led to the sudden recall of all their committed capital. While it had been committed money, it hadn’t yet reached their bank accounts, and Babak had no choice but to let the deal go. “When the economy turns for the worse, there is nothing you can do but play the best hand you are dealt. It’s like catching a falling knife—you’re bound to get hurt. When redemptions happen, there’s nothing you can do,” he notes. “You can’t force them to stick with you. Clients always remember the bad, and given that we were a new firm, we wanted to develop clients for life. Ultimately, people trust us with their money, and we have to always think in the best interests of the client, even when it’s against our own interest. We were able to recover by adapting our strategy, but then we wondered what we should do next?”

While the economy was unstable, the demand for consulting seemed somewhat stable. Babak had accumulated some clients through his MBA program, most of whom were doctors who needed assistance running their practices, and he began consulting for them. He slowly gained prominence throughout the area, and people began coming to him for his counsel on an array of business problems, including strategy, risk mitigation and management, mergers & acquisitions, organizational integration, operations management, marketing, deal development, capital raising, and the process of going international.

Looking back, Babak noted that the only thing he would have changed about the development of HafeziCapital would be the timing. “I could have achieved everything in two years in a good economy, but instead I did it in four years and used a lot of money because I started when the economy was anemic,” he observes. “I wish I had waited so that I might have gotten more bang for my buck when the economy turned itself around. But then again, you never know what the economy will do.”

Despite the hardships the company saw in its early years, Babak kept his head held high, to which he credits the support of his family and peers. “They always told me to give it time,” he affirms. “Their

support gave me the belief that I was going down the right path. I surround myself with people who believe in HafeziCapital, themselves, and can complement my weaknesses. HafeziCapital is a multi-faceted puzzle, each piece complementing the other. As a whole, we are stronger for that. Everyone around me strengthens me in one way or another.”

As a leader, Babak hopes to give the same sense of capability to his employees that he feels himself. “I believe leadership is about giving tools to your peers and making sure they have a north star to follow,” Babak explains. “I don’t believe in hovering or micromanaging. If you hire the right person, you don’t need to micromanage them. We’re a small team, so we all need to get our respective jobs done. They need to be confident enough and have the capacity to deliver what we ask of them.” He also notes that it should be a reciprocal relationship, where both the leader and the employee can push each other and talk freely about the next steps. “We create highways for mobility within the company,” he avows. “Everyone wants to succeed and not stay where we are, so we create these highways to become better and allow the freedom to collectively grow. Everyone has the ability to build their own highway; it just has to work with the company’s overall strategy.”

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Babak stresses the importance of that very same support system that got him through the rough fledgling months of starting his company. “For anyone to be successful, they need to have a love of their life,” he remarks. For Babak, this entails his intelligent, loyal, and ever-supportive fiancé, but also extends inward to encompass the need to have a passion for one’s work.

“There will be times you stop believing in yourself and what you’re doing, so make sure your passion is great enough to carry you through those moments,” he says.

“Never follow money. Follow your passion, and money will always come.” He also invites young people to embrace their failures, noting that those darkest times are when the greatest lessons are learned. “Fail big and fail fast. This way, you learn and don’t waste time.

Personalities are developed when people are challenged.

Always remember to dust yourself off and get back to work. Always remember that success lies within your own hands, and never allow fear to creep in,” he says.

As he commits to finding avenues to efficiency for his clients and highways to success for those around him, Babak’s legacy is one that mirrors the grander narrative of the country that allowed him to do thrive. “I want to be another success story that defines American Babak Hafezi

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exceptionalism,” he says. “I came here, and it took me in. America takes individuals from all over the world and gives them hope. This hopefulness and optimism is an American characteristic. Only in America can an eighteen-year-old kid have a technological idea and be funded by angel investors and venture capital to the tune of millions. American exceptionalism is based on hope and opportunity, and this formula is very hard to replicate. ” And what America has done for him, he does for others. Despite his great success in the United States, he is aware of his roots and of those who helped him.

“I now work with Iranian activists to help tortured

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individuals out of Iran,” he explains. “These teenagers are physically and psychologically abused by the Iranian regime and stuck in prison, so we work with international groups to eventually obtain refugee status for them and allow them to live in a safe country and pursue their respective dreams.” He views his success as his own avenue, enabling him the power to help those less fortunate than him, and although his time in Iran was short, he feels a strong moral obligation to help bring it back to peace and prosperity. “My family and friends pushed me toward success when I was down,” Babak affirms. “I hope I can do that for my peers, and for my country, in return.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

John Holaday Why Didn’t I Think of That?

At 67 years old, John Holaday’s agile mind is as quick to summon an incisive quotation as it is to deliver a structured and clear explanation of esoteric medical science. In recalling a career spanning decades as a scientist in the U.S. Army and as a businessman in the private sector, John’s first quotation opens the door into the story of his success, built by thinking of things that no one has thought of before.

“Albert Szent-Györgyi,” John begins, “the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the essential role of Vitamin C in humans in the 1930s, said of creativity and scientific discovery: ‘Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.’

In my life, this has meant not just thinking something different, but also finding the way to follow through. Those who come after you look at your discovery and ask, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ That has been a real motivator for me.”

Today, John is the CEO and Managing Director of QRxPharma, an Australianbased commercial-stage specialty pharmaceutical company that is focused on the development and commercialization of new pain management treatments. At the foundation of the development of these treatments is the wisdom of Albert Szent-Györgyi, and of the long career of John Holaday, himself.

Long before he was the CEO of a multimillion dollar, publicly-traded pharmaceutical company promising a breakthrough treatment for acute and chronic pain, John was commissioned in the U.S. Army in 1966. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry and a masters in molecular biology from the University of Alabama, he was first scheduled to fly helicopters. “That probably would have been the death of me,” John says.

“But due to my resume, I ultimately was assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where I stayed for my full army and civil service career, from 1968 to 1988.”

Today, John holds more than 65 patents related to medical science, many of which he secured for the Army at Walter Reed. “In the Army, they weren’t very

experienced at what we now call ‘tech transfer,’” he explains. “If you’ve got a patent, nobody’s going to come knocking on your door to say, ‘I want to license that.’

You have to go out and find a way to bring patents to patients.”

John’s keen memory stretches back all the way to the first indication of his entrepreneurial instinct, when he was eight years old and he wanted a television set.

“It was 1953,” he recalls. “My father, being a professor of educational psychology, thought that television sets were a bad influence, and expensive. He told me that, if I wanted one, I’d have to earn it myself. So I decided to sell food and drinks to his classes at the University of Tennessee.”

John would take his American Flyer wagon, which he had painted grey with red wheels, to his father’s classes and take orders from the students. He would then go over to the student union building, fill the orders, and bring them back to the classes. “I had a fruitcake tin,” John says, “where I’d store my earnings. I didn’t charge more than what I paid for the items, but I made money in tips. Working for two summers, I earned $120 and bought an Emerson television set with an 8 inch diagonal screen. What fun! That was our only TV for several years.”

A second formative experience occurred later in life when John decided to pursue a career in the medical sciences. “I had a profoundly important biology teacher in high school who had steered me in this direction,” John remembers. “My early experiences in managing family illnesses made it difficult for me to witness all of that and be the family liaison to the doctors. I decided that I could never be engaged as a physician where a patient’s life and death had such a profound day to day impact.”

Through this important realization, John saw that he could have an impact in a different way. “You can either become a physician and have a great impact with a smaller number of people through direct hands-on intervention, or you can pursue research in the medical sciences, where you can have a different sort of impact John Holaday

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on a much larger number of people,” John explains. “As a scientist, I’ve always been interested in the wisdom of the body, and how we can capitalize on that knowledge to make people more healthy.”

And capitalize, he did. As a Captain in the Army and subsequently as a senior civil servant, John headed several lines of discovery, including a breakthrough in managing complications due to circulatory shock using opioid antagonists, treating spinal cord injury and changing immune function. But the Army is not organized to develop drugs, and he left in 1989 to find his fortune in the private sector.

John’s quest to build new drugs caused him to leave his academic career at Walter Reed in 1988, and the first company he co-founded after that, Medicis, was recently sold for about $2.5 billion. Then, in 1992, he formed a cancer company, EntreMed, in Rockville Maryland, took this company public on NASDAQ in 1996, and served as Chairman and CEO for a decade. Throughout his career, he has raised over $500 million for companies he has developed and taken public in the US and Australia.

John’s drive to build new companies and new drugs to make a difference in treating patients derives from his passion to push himself to see what others couldn’t, and by his ability to recognize this passion in others. He continues to live this philosophy, and it ultimately led him to the helm of QRxPharma.

The origins of QRxPharma may be traced back to the origin of a class of painkillers: opioids. Beginning with the discovery of morphine, first extracted from the opium poppy plant in 1803 by a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertürner, opioids quickly became the best pain reliever for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. Morphine and the opioids that followed it, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, found in the brand name drugs Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin, are powerful analgesics for acute or chronic pain.

But while opioids are extremely effective at treating pain, they result in several severe side effects: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, constipation, itchiness, and respiratory depression. “It’s respiratory depression that is of the most concern,” John says, “because that’s the one that’s deadly.”

In the late 1980s, the World Health Organization had indicated in its 1988 international drug convention that medical professionals should not combine two separate opiates in the treatment of pain. The WHO surmised that the potential danger exceeded the possibility of benefit.

“This was a reasonable fear,” John says, “but it wasn’t science. It was a public policy decree.” Nonetheless, in 2002, Professor Maree Smith, a scientist at the University 70

of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, ventured to study the possibilities of combining different opioids.

“She combined morphine and oxycodone,” John explains, “and found that they provide synergy in pain relief and lower side effects. A smaller dose of each, when combined, gave better pain relief than the same amount of either alone. More significantly, side effects were reduced 75 percent to 100 percent in certain cases.

That’s remarkable. This has the potential to dramatically revolutionize moderate to severe pain treatment.”

John had specialized in the study of painkillers, particularly opiates, when pursuing his PhD in the field of neuropharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, in the early 1970’s. “This was a field I cut my teeth in a long time ago,” John says. “And it was an opportunity to apply what I had learned.” Beyond his experience and expertise with opiates, John saw a higher connection to the research. This scientist had seen something different where others hadn’t, and John wasn’t the only one who recognized this fact. “Typically,” John says, “putting two already-existing chemicals together would not justify a new patent. But because the World Health Organization had preached against combining these two drugs, and this scientist did it and made it work, the University of Queensland was granted a composition of matter patent.”

Thus, a company was formed in 2002 that acquired the patents for the morphine-oxycodone combination and other intellectual property from the University of Queensland. QRxPharma was born, and John came on as CEO in 2007 and took the company public in Australia, initially raising $50 million. “So we have a composition of matter patent around two old drugs that we taught new tricks,” John quips wryly.

Over the past ten years, QRxPharma has reached and surpassed many milestones, and with applications before the FDA, the achievement of QRxPharma’s goal cannot be far off. John’s personal mission won’t end there, however. His older child is completing his freshman year at the University of Southern California, and his younger child is a junior at Walt Whitman High School. They are the foundation of his legacy, which is also expanded by a foundation that John and his wife launched and run today. “Through our foundation, we strive to help educate people in the arts and sciences and give them the opportunity to succeed,” John says. “We have a few undergraduates at the University of Alabama benefiting from our scholarships.” The Holadays also support several arts and sciences organizations, such as the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. John Holaday has seen financial and professional

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

success, and he has received numerous awards, but the most rewarding aspect of his career is seeing others learn and benefit from his experiences. With that in mind, he advises young people entering the working world today to engage in the process of observation and critical thinking that will enable them to see

what others overlook and make a difference. “One of the things that I think is important is the evolution of the spirit,” John says. “By reflecting, synthesizing, planning, and taking action, success becomes not the anecdote you overlook, but the story you think of and live out yourself.”

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Atul Jain The Values Train Atul Jain, the founder and CEO of TEOCO, which provides software-based solutions to the telecommunications industry, is on a mission.

“It is my dream and goal to promote the practice of principled entrepreneurship,” Atul says. “I want to prove that nice people can win in this game of business, and that you don’t have to sell your soul to the devil in order to succeed.” His book, At What Price?, details how to make a profit without sacrificing your values, and as he builds his business, so too does he develop a business model that will stand on its own.

In the book, Atul aims to describe not only the joys of running a principle-centric workplace, but also the challenges. “The book is not meant to convince people to be principled in business,” he says. “Rather, I am writing to the people who wish to be principled but may not know how to do so.

And I hope that they can then build on my ideas.”

Atul describes a business world where, at every turn, people expect you to sacrifice a little piece of your values to make slightly more money—just a little piece here and a little piece there. It may not seem like much at first, but over time, these slight course corrections can amount to an enormous change in direction.

“If you look at two pairs of train tracks that run parallel to each other,” Atul explains, “you will see that they arrive at the same destination. But if one of the tracks begins to diverge from the other even by a very small amount, then their ultimate destinations can be very different. When you abandon your values train and get on a different track, soon enough you are not headed in the direction you had planned.”

Remaining the faithful conductor of his own values train, Atul has founded and led a business to great success. TEOCO, which stands for The EmployeeOwned Company, was founded in 1995 to provide software-based solutions to the telecommunications industry. With over 650 employees, it has never missed payroll, remains profitable, and sees revenues of over $100 million, but Atul didn’t start this business to make profits alone. Rather, he started it to prove that

it’s possible to create profits without sacrificing values.

And in the 17 years since the company’s inception, that’s exactly what he’s done. “It’s been a fun journey,” he says, “and many people have helped me. I’m grateful for the support I’ve received over the years.”

Atul grew up in a modest household in the largest state in India, and while his family had enough money to put food on the table, they enjoyed very few luxuries.

Atul’s father worked for the Public Works Department (PWD) for the government, building roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects. The PWD suffered from rampant corruption, with abundant opportunities to make extra money through bribes. Young Atul learned that his father was an honorable man who resisted temptation and stood up for his principles, but sometimes found himself in the way of others who sought to benefit from that corruption. Yet even as he received physical threats, he still did his best to stick to his principles.

“I was a child at the time,” Atul recalls, “and we never had an explicit conversation about this, but I witnessed the everyday struggle. I believe that children learn much more through observing their parents and the world than through being lectured.”

Atul’s mother was a homemaker and was also a strong influence. “I saw her work harder than I’ve seen anyone work in their lives,” Atul says today. “And she not only did it, but she did it with a smile.”

Born in Kanpur in 1961, Atul left home at the age of 11 to attend boarding school in 1972. A gifted math student, he graduated high school in 1976 at the age of 15 and went on to attend the Indian Statistical Institute later that year in Calcutta. He came to the US in 1981 to pursue a Ph. D. in Math at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but did not complete his dissertation. “This is a regret,” Atul says somberly, “and one of the few things I’ve started and not finished. The experience of leaving the program, and what led to it, is something that still lives with me.”

About a year into the PhD program, Atul became involved in playing the card-game bridge at a competitive Atul Jain

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level. He began traveling around the country, attending tournaments and competing for what are called Masterpoints in the competitive bridge community. It was at this time that he fell into a pattern of behavior that led directly to leaving the PhD program without completing it.

“I wish I knew what happened,” Atul says. “When addiction happens, it doesn’t ask your permission.

Playing bridge is very intense, and I played it at a high level for prestige. My natural analytical talent, combined with my flair for the game, made me a difficult player to compete against.”

As he played more, Atul fell into company with other bridge players who were betting on sports on the side.

Atul still remembers his first wager: a friendly, five dollar bet on a football game—the Cincinnati Bengals and the Cleveland Browns. “One thing led to another,” Atul says.

“It was not something I could have predicted. I never thought I would get suckered into this. Bridge was one thing. It would never have taken me down. But this gambling addiction became something else entirely, and it threatened my very existence.”

By the time he finally quit, Atul had accumulated debt that totaled more than three times his annual income.

But more than that, gambling had taken over his life, and he couldn’t see a path forward.

“Along with the first bet I made,” Atul says, “I remember the last. It was an over-under in college football between Alabama and Auburn. Everything was fine going into the last quarter, and I was set to win easily, but through a series of fumbles, the score rapidly changed and it was all over.”

That was December, a couple weeks before Christmas.

Dejected and with nowhere to turn, Atul changed the TV to something that was not a football game. As luck would have it, he found himself watching a movie called It’s a Wonderful Life.

“You know the story,” Atul says. “George Bailey is on a bridge, and faced with a huge financial crisis at his Savings & Loan, he is planning to jump into the raging river to his death. Suddenly, an angel jumps into the river ahead of him. George’s natural instincts take over and he jumps into the river to save the angel. The angel proceeds to show George the impact he has had on people’s lives and what would have happened to Bedford Falls without him. My angel was coming through this film.”

Atul had never before heard of the movie, but on that night it sparked a remarkable transformation in his life.

It gave him hope and courage, and the desire to come back from the crisis he found himself in. Just like George 74

Bailey, Atul had helped many already, and he wanted to continue to make the world a better place.

“I vowed that if I did make it back,” Atul says, “I would try to touch as many lives as possible in a positive way. It is so good to be sitting here telling you that I have made it back. That I’m helping as many people as I can.”

Atul returned to school at Urbana-Champaign and began a Masters in Computer Science. He worked hard and made it through all the coursework and exams, but he found himself stalled at the finish line, at a loss as to how to complete his Master’s thesis. This time, it wouldn’t be an angel that saved him.

“Right around then, my brother got married,” Atul remembers. “My parents came from India for the wedding, and after my brother left on his honeymoon, my parents decided to come stay with me for two weeks.

They could tell I was in trouble immediately, so my father decided they would not go back to India until I finished my Master’s thesis. I don’t know how they figured it out, but they did.”

With that, Atul told his parents he would complete the thesis in 30 days and set to work. “Deadlines have power,” he affirms. “I didn’t want my parents spending three months with me, waiting, wasting their life. I just didn’t have the heart to let them down one more time.

I had already thrown away so much to gambling, and I hadn’t finished my PhD.” Atul put his head down and worked harder than he had ever worked before in his life. With help from his parents and many friends, he completed the thesis within 30 days—something a typical student might spend several months on. His parents went back home to India, and Atul began his working life. “I spent about six and a half years at Teknekron Software Systems (now TIBCO),” he details. “I didn’t want to bring my gambling debts into my marriage, so I saved aggressively on a fairly modest income, paid off everything I owed, and got married to my wonderful wife, Priti, in June of 1990.”

Atul, a bright young man with two masters degrees in math and computer science, saw plenty of opportunities to grow at TIBCO. But over and over again, there was something about the culture that rubbed him the wrong way, pushing him to consider starting his own business.

“I had never thought about being an entrepreneur,” Atul says. “I call myself an accidental entrepreneur.

I became one to show that creating joy and business success didn’t have to compete with each other. I was in a good position at a strong company, with good people and good pay. But immediate profits always came first at TIBCO. They wouldn’t address an employee issue unless the employee threatened to quit. They wouldn’t act with

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a sense of urgency on a tough project unless the client threatened to walk. These things didn’t feel right to me.”

Atul told himself that he wanted to reverse the model and put employees first, then the client, and then business. He reasoned that, if you take care of your employees, then they will take care of the clients, and that will take care of the business. “And so I worked out an agreement with my wife,” Atul says.

“We had saved a bit on money, but we had two young children. We decided to give my plan twelve months to prove it could succeed.”

Eventually, Atul’s strategy evolved to one of alignment with employees, clients, and community.

This alignment is exemplified within TEOCO’s logo, a Mobius strip. The Mobius strip is a loop with only one surface. If you take a pen and start tracing a line across the surface, you will cover the entire surface and return to the starting point without lifting the pen.

“I still feel to this day that I’ve never been trained to be a businessman,” Atul confides. “TEOCO is very successful, but I believe strongly that it is not my brilliance that engenders that success. Yes, I’ve created the company and a positive work environment, but I have an extremely strong management team that has more business sense than I do. I have been fortunate to attract them and to retain them by empowering them

with much of the decision-making in our company. As I strive to be a teacher and mentor, I see many of the people working alongside me to be my own coaches and mentors.”

TEOCO’s business has evolved considerably over the years. Atul acquired a modest amount of intellectual property in 1998 and converted it into a business that became the leading provider of Cost Management solutions to telecom carriers in North America. With the acquisition of Vibrant Solutions and Vero Systems, TEOCO continued its upward trajectory. However, it is the acquisition of two Israeli-based companies, TTI Telecom and Schema, that has converted TEOCO into a global provider of software solutions to telecom carriers worldwide.

Atul continues to impact people’s lives in a positive way, whether it is through mentoring TEOCO employees worldwide, writing his book, giving talks on the subject of Principled Entrepreneurship, or encouraging his three children, Ankit, Mayank, and Nehal. This inclination is apparent in his advice to young people entering the business world today. “I would tell students that how you get there is at least as important, if not more important, than where you get to,” he affirms. “Because you can run away from everyone but yourself. At the end of the day, you have to be proud and at peace with where—and who—you are.”

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Sonya Jain Another Door Opens When enough doors had slammed in Sonya Jain’s face, she decided to take the back way in.

Ever since earning her MBA from the University of Massachusetts, she had been told by countless potential employers that despite her impressive qualifications, they would not even give her an interview until she had attained her Green Card.

In the past, she had done as she was told and looked for work elsewhere, but as she was turned away at the front door of a job fair in Tysons Corner, Virginia, she realized she had had enough. “I was told that without my Green Card, I wasn’t even allowed to enter the fair,” she explains. “I started walking away when I noticed a woman leaving the building from a side door, so I used that door to enter the fair instead.”

When one door closes, another door opens, and sometimes more than one.

Because she didn’t take no for an answer that time, Sonya was able to actually land a job with a consulting firm at the fair.

“They didn’t even ask about my Green Card. Since I still had a valid Student’s Visa that allowed me one year of work experience, I didn’t bring it up either.” she explains. “They didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t bring it up until six months later, when I had really shown them what I was capable of. Once I had proven myself, I told my boss I needed him to sponsor me.”

With the help of her employer, she was able to finally attain her work permit, and has since opened door after door for herself, working her way up in the world of consulting so that today, she is the founder, President, and CEO of eGlobalTech, a management consulting firm that works the gamut from enterprise architecture to business and IT consulting and cyber security services, with a focus on government contracting.

“About 95 percent of our contracts are direct with the government,” she explains. “Most small companies grow as subcontractors, but I like us to have control, so I was lucky to have started my business in a field where I was already well known and could win my own contracts.”

Before starting eGlobalTech in 2004, Sonya had worked at Booz Allen Hamilton for twelve years, at which point she found herself at a crossroads. “Booz Allen was a great company to work for, with great people and clients, but there is always an element of bureaucracy in a company that big, and I felt it was inhibiting me from doing everything I wanted to do with my career,” she explains. She entertained the idea of trying something new for several years but didn’t take action until, unfortunately, a health issue forced her to cut back at work. “I had been wondering if I could handle starting my own thing for a while, and the illness showed me I had to get out of there and do something different,” she recalls. “I had been comfortable at Booz Allen, so I could have continued working at a frantic pace, but my health caused me to take a step back.”

In 2004, she officially left Booz Allen.

In a twist of fate, a federal client she had known for several years from the Department of Labor approached her to be a project manager on a large contract, which allowed her to start her company with a project already underway. Her first hire was a smart young executive from PwC, who now serves as her Senior Vice President, and together they grew the company to its current size of 200 employees.

When Sonya started eGlobalTech in 2004, she focused on building the company around her own core values, which she felt had been missing in her previous career endeavors. “I read the book FISH! by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and Jon Christensen around the time I was leaving Booz and envisioning my own company,” she explains. “In short, it discusses how the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle has such happy workers because they focus on being present, having fun, having the right attitude, and making someone’s day. It really clicked with me, and I found I really wanted to start my company with that idea of knowing the people you work with and creating a family-like culture within the work environment.”

It comes as no surprise that Sonya wanted to build Sonya Jain

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a family-like company, since family has always been her top priority. She was born in India to her mother, a homemaker, and her father, who served in the Indian Army. Like most military families, they moved to a new city every three years, which taught Sonya early on how to adapt to any situation. “Moving around was wonderful in that we got to meet so many people and see so many places, but it had its drawbacks too,” she recalls. “It always took a while to make new friends, and each school studied different material at different times, so sometimes I’d repeat a subject, and other times I would completely miss one.” In order to stay on top of her studies, Sonya had to work twice as hard just to ensure she was on the same page as the rest of the class. “Between catching up in school and making a spot on the sports team, there were a lot of challenges, but I made a point to get over them, and I think that’s influenced my business today,” she says. “There are challenges every day, but you have to spend your time finding ways to overcome them.”

While Sonya is competitive in almost every aspect of her life now, she needed a little prompting as a child.

Up until fifth grade, she had been a mediocre student, succumbing to the struggles of the constant relocating.

“I really wanted a new watch, but my Dad said he would only get it for me when I came first in my class,” she smiles. “He told me he knew I could do it, and I wanted that watch badly enough, so I worked until I came in first. After that, I realized I liked that feeling so much that I always had to keep doing it, in whatever I did.”

Her father, who had been wise enough to ignite her competitive edge, has always played an instrumental role in Sonya’s life. “He never forced anything on my sister and I, but he would sit with us and talk it out, discussing every pro and con until we felt good about a decision,” she says.

While Sonya worked hard at school, she rarely thought about what she wanted to be when she grew up. Ironically, the gaping disparity between India’s rich and rampant poverty led Sonya to decide as a child that she did not want to be a businessperson. She also knew, however, that she wanted to do something different from what most women did at that time. “We lived in the upper middle class with strong military influence, which had adapted some of the Western mentality of women’s equality,” she says. “This was not true all over India, however. In most places, girls’ education was not a high priority, but my father was adamant about putting my sister and I in the best schools in whatever city we were in. He wanted us to have the best education and a couple of years of experience so that, if something 78

happened in our lives, we could stand on our own two feet. After that, he was supportive of us getting careers or staying home to take care of a family, as long as we were prepared for any challenge or opportunity.”

Sonya spent the last two years of high school at a boarding school, since her father had left the Army and begun work in the private sector. After graduating, she attended the Indian Institute of Technology to pursue a degree in Engineering. “In India, if you were a woman and decided to have a career back then, your main options were to become a teacher or a doctor,” she says.

“I chose engineering because I wanted to do something not many other women had done.”

After graduating, she got a job in India in the field of sIT for a company in hopes to live near her parents; unfortunately, however, the office she was supposed to work in closed, so in order to stay with the company, she would have to move to the United States. “All of my friends had applied to move to the US, but I didn’t want to leave India,” she confesses. “But my father urged me to go, so I agreed to, under the condition that my parents visit so we could tour the country together.”

With the agreement in mind, Sonya moved to the US and worked for a year, during which time she was accepted with a full-ride scholarship to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to pursue her MBA. “I told myself that the day after I graduated, I would go back to India because the luxuries are so vast here compared to the rest of the world, and I knew I would never want to leave otherwise,” she remarks. Staying true to her plan, she bought a ticket back to India in advance for the day after graduation. She never made the plane, however, because during an internship in Washington, D.C. with World Bank, she met her husband. The two were married in August of 1989, just months after she graduated, and rather than returning home to India, she relocated to Washington.

After attaining her Green Card, she continued working with the small company for two years, until it was unfortunately shut down. Although she worked as an independent contractor for several months to finish up projects for previous clients, she had no trouble finding a job the second time around. With her Green Card in hand, she landed seven job offers within a few short weeks, from which she decided to join Booz Allen.

After twelve years with Booz, her transition towards eGlobalTech was seamless. “I chose to build a management consulting firm because that’s what I really knew,” she says. “I like working directly with clients and doing things that make them successful. It’s all about coming up with ideas, solutions, and ways to

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solve problems for my clients.”

Despite the recession, the company has continued to grow at an impressive rate, thanks not only to Sonya’s willingness to face adverse times head on, but also to her dedication to her family of employees. “I try to take care of the people who work for my company,” she says. “Communication is key; I have a vision, and I can see when something isn’t working, so I’m able to guide them and show them when it’s time to take things to the next level.”

Although Sonya places a heavy focus on caring for her company and employees, she still makes sure to put her family first. Several times throughout her career, she willingly backed off to part time in order to spend more time with her daughters, one of whom is now in college, while the other is a senior in high school. “It’s hard to find time to do much else between work and my family,” she laughs. Her husband now works as the CFO for eGlobalTech, and his skill set serves as the perfect balance to hers, both at work and at home. “He’s more cautious than I am,” she explains.

“I could spend money on anything, and he stops me. I do whatever I feel is right, and he reigns me in when it’s appropriate. He’s very detail oriented, while I’m more of a big picture person, so it’s a good combination.”

When the two are not focusing on eGlobalTech or their daughters, they make an effort to give back to their community in whatever way they can. Because

of her military background, Sonya has regularly helped out with such charities as Operation Covert Santa, which provides Christmas gifts for families of wounded soldiers. Additionally, Sonya has donated both personally and through the company to ASHA, a charity for battered Asian women in America, as well as Girls Learn International, which helps promote education and equal rights to women in underprivileged countries.

On a personal level, however, Sonya differentiates herself from others as a leader who is always willing to help, whether it’s offering advice or simply listening.

“I’m always sitting down with my employees, clients, or friends to talk out whatever problem may be on their mind, whether it’s work-related or personal,” she explains. “I want to share my experiences and connect with people in a genuine way.”

In advising young people entering the workforce today, Sonya emphasizes the importance of learning.

“It is so amazing to me that there is so much to learn from every different person and event and situation,” she says. “I don’t think that you can ever know everything, so just learn and be humble, because if you are humble, you can take in so much more.” By staying engaged, open-minded, and willing to learn, you make sure you aren’t just waiting for the doors to the future to open for you—rather, you open those doors yourself.

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Dallice Joyner Something From Nothing Dallice Joyner, the fourth of six children, grew up poor but happy in the tiny rural town of Garland, North Carolina. From nothing, the McKoy family made something, and they did it together. By the age of six, Dallice was helping out in the tobacco fields, and ever after contributed to the family’s finances as much as possible. At 17, the schedule she kept would’ve overwhelmed most adults; waking up at 5:30 AM to drive a morning bus route, attending school, then driving the afternoon route with only twenty minutes to spare before her 4:30 shift at the local shirt factory. After the shift ended at 9:30 PM, she still found time to do homework and participate in sports.

Dallice and her five siblings were all expected to help provide for the family.

Her three sisters worked in the shirt factory as well, but only Dallice went to such extremes as working the bus route on top of everything else. “I never felt any resentment,” she recalls, thinking back on her hectic high school schedule. “It was my idea. I don’t know how I did all that, but those were some amazing years. The experience showed me what I was capable of, and I couldn’t make a whole lot of excuses.” All of Dallice’s earnings were shared equally with her family, but she was happy to help as much as possible, and out of that attitude of hard work and selflessness, she has built a career climbing the ladder while helping others climb right along with her.

Today, Dallice is the Executive Director of the Northern Virginia Area Heath Education Center (NVAHEC), an organization dedicated to supporting local health care providers by helping to offer services to vulnerable populations. AHEC centers exist across the country, with seven in Virginia alone, but their mission and activities vary from place to place based on community need. NVAHEC, for instance, focuses specifically on enabling communication between nonEnglish speakers and healthcare providers by training high-quality interpreters and promoting access to their services. “Everybody takes that role just a little bit for granted,” Dallice points out. “But we always say that,

during a healthcare encounter, interpreters are the most important people in the room. They understand both languages and both cultures when nobody else does.”

Founded in 1995, Dallice took over as the Executive Director in 2005, conscious that her role was not to sustain the organization, but to grow it. She brought in business consultants to build a practical strategy to move forward, and in her tenure there, has transitioned the group from 47 percent fee-for-service to 95 percent fee-for-service. Today they have a budget of almost $2 million, with only one small federal grant of about $100,000.

Just as importantly, the group has never been better regarded in the healthcare community. “We know hands down from clients that we are the best language access organization in the state, and that we come highly recommended,” she explains. “We do a certificate program for interpreters, filling a gap where otherwise, there would be none. Today, our certifications are recognized across the state.” Indeed, at any given time, NVAHEC employs between 100 and 150 contract interpreters. The group also works closely with health care organizations, setting up capacity to institutionalize language access.

Dallice’s success at NVAHEC is only the latest chapter in her astonishing rise out of poverty, and she attributes her success in no small part to her mother’s unwavering strength. Married at 14 and with only an eighth grade education, she worked at the shirt factory and was a living example of tenacity and independence.

“She always said to us, ‘Be able to take care of yourself.

Don’t depend on other people to do things for you.’”

Dallice recalls. “And we took that and have used it in our lives. I’ve always had a sense that, if I want to do something, no one is going to do it for me.”

Along with working in tobacco fields from age six, she and her three older sisters worked in the blueberry fields every summer from early morning until evening. Her mother’s attitude of “do what you’ve got to do” rubbed off on all of her children, and Dallice remembers the long days in the blueberry fields as Dallice Joyner

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happy ones. Although the family was close, her father, a butcher at the local grocery store, suffered from alcoholism throughout her childhood, finally getting sober twenty years ago—and for those years, Dallice is profoundly grateful.

In tiny Garland, only 28 students graduated in Dallice’s high school class, and 16 of them black. Of the eight young black men, none attended college. Of the seven women, Dallice was one of a few who went on to college, and one of the only young black women in her class to initially earn her Bachelor’s degree. She still fondly recalls the three high school teachers who were particularly instrumental in encouraging her talents, Mr. Norris, Ms. Boney, and Ms. Thompson. The latter two, as black women, served as aspirational role models. “If I stepped out of line, they would either call my mom or show up at my house!” she laughs today.

“There was constant communication between all of them, and they were genuinely interested in me and my future.” After graduation, Dallice went on to pursue her B.S. in Health Education, and then reluctantly returned to Garland to look for work.

Her first job out of school was with the Health Department of her home county, providing blood pressure checks and health education for rural communities. Despite long hours, the position was a rewarding one. “Going into the community really reinforced my love for people, and for being able to make things happen,” she says, remembering her experiences as a health educator. She recalls the creativity necessary for running programs with few or no resources; in one community, she was sent to help raise awareness in women of high blood pressure and the importance of exercise, but a suitable place for aerobic activity was difficult to come by. Adept by now at making something out of nothing, however, she asked the local men to give up half of their basketball court for the purpose, and twice a week, she would drive 50 miles each way with a boom box and cassette tape to teach.

Two years later, as she was preparing to leave for a new job, the town decided to organize a walk-a-thon for the American Heart Association. It had been Dallice’s enthusiasm and passion that had gotten the people genuinely interested in their health, and she was able to move on in her career with a profound sense of accomplishment. Taking care of people—and helping people take care of themselves—has thus been the focus of her life ever since. “One of the things I concluded in my early adult years about my passion is that, of course, things are important,” she admits.

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“Houses are important and money is important. But people are our greatest commodity, and in my mind, that’s where our investment should be.”

After three years living back in Garland, Dallice knew it was time for a change. Most people there stayed put, and even her mother was shocked when Dallice accepted a job offer from the Health Department in Winston-Salem. But Dallice had a plan: she would go to graduate school and further advance herself.

The Health Department in Winston-Salem was a vastly different environment from the one she’d left behind, but she had to learn how to apply the skills she’d acquired in Garland to a much more resourcerich community, and to adapt to an urban health department. “That transition taught me a whole lot,” she details. “It taught me how to be much more versatile, whatever environment I was in.” Her boss also proved to be a great inspiration, especially when at the end of her first year, she was given a “fair” on her employee evaluation. Livid, she demanded to know why. Her boss replied that, while her work was good, she never took any risks, and that push was all Dallice needed to begin fully embracing her potential. “It made a world of difference, because she saw things in me that I didn’t see,” Dallice affirms. “That was the potential she was trying to pull out in me.” The next year, she received an “excellent” on her evaluation.

Before she left Winston-Salem, she had obtained a Master’s in Education, with a concentration in Community Health, and become the Health Education Director. She had twelve people working under her, and she was building the leadership skills she would need to successfully run NVAHEC. Her next position was as a consultant for the state government, and here too she found a mentor in an effective boss, yet another influence who helped shape her leadership skills.

Dallice watched her boss carefully over three years.

“Not a month goes by that I don’t use something she taught me,” she says. From that consulting position, she then moved on to run NVAHEC. As a leader, Dallice thinks of herself as hands-off in general but intolerant of poor quality of work. “I’m relatively laid back as a leader, especially if I’ve got the right staff in place,” she explains. “To me, it’s important to have a staff that I trust and respect, that I believe in, who can get things done. I like to be able to delegate a responsibility and not dictate how it happens. I consider micromanaging to be babysitting adults, and I’m not good at it!” Fortunately, after eight years of running NVAHEC, she feels she has in place a dependable staff that trusts her vision and operates effectively.

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Her personal life, as well, is a tremendous source of happiness for Dallice. Married for 24 years, her husband, 21-year-old daughter, and 17-year-old son are her greatest priorities. “They are my main motivation,” she avows. “At the end of the day, as long as my husband, my children, and my dog think I’m the neatest person in the world, I know I’ve done the right thing.”

Her husband’s support has been a major positive force as she’s fought to build her career. “He’s one of my biggest cheerleaders,” she smiles. “One of the things I appreciate so much about him is that he’s never tried to hold me back professionally. Instead, he celebrates every move I make.” For someone dedicated to investing in people, it’s hardly surprising that family is so important to Dallice—she also maintains constant contact with her mother and siblings, all of whom remain in North Carolina.

As someone whose legacy revolves around the

vital contributions she’s made to her family and to society, Dallice believes young adults are a particularly important group to be investing in. “Guidance and assistance at this crucial time in a person’s life can turn into a lifetime of success,” she points out. That’s why, when advising young people entering the working world today, Dallice advocates for the importance of education while also reminding us that education isn’t everything.

“I tell people all the time that my mom is the smartest person I know, and she has an eighth grade education level,” Dallice points out. “Keeping that perspective, I think, is very important. Education is certainly vital, but it’s not going to get you through everything in life.”

Indeed, more important than any degree is hard work, a strong will, and an empathetic heart; three things Dallice Joyner, like her mother before her, have used to make something out of nothing and to really make something of themselves.

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W. Matt Kelly Groundwork Mabel Stratford Hancock, read the name on the gravestone that stood before Matthew Kelly. The year was 1987, and at fourteen years old, Matt wasn’t quite sure why his father had paused the family’s road trip from their hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, and insisted that they stop to visit Green Mountain Cemetery in Sundance, Wyoming. “I remember standing there with my father,” Matt recalls today. “He said we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for what she did for my grandfather.

When he began to tell me Mabel’s story, I realized it was more than the stone and the ground that lay before me—it was the very foundation upon which the success of my family was built.”

Mabel was the daughter of a wealthy English absentee landlord of an estate in Dunmore, Ireland. At the turn of the twentieth century, she was a young woman living on the estate for several years leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, in which the Irish rebelled against the English. Matt’s grandfather was the son of the Irish family that worked the estate, and through occasional contact, Mabel saw great potential in the boy and took an interest in teaching him to read. These lessons came over the strong objections of Matt’s great grandfather, who was violently anti-British. The lessons continued in secret, in the rafters of the barn and behind the haystacks. Through these lessons, Mabel showed Matt’s grandfather the value of an education and sparked in him the drive to better himself.

When the Irish rebellion began, Mabel left Ireland and settled in Sundance, Wyoming, where she lived the rest of her life. She and Matt’s grandfather never lost touch, and she would send money back to the estate so he could invest in maintaining the graves of her ancestors who had lived and died there. They both died within a year of each other in 1950.

“When I saw that gravestone and heard the story, I was most struck by the resounding merit of doing good works, even when you may not be alive to see the eventual outcomes,” Matt remarks today. “Mabel had no idea how far-reaching her legacy would be. Because

she taught my grandfather how to read, he became a schoolteacher in his town and raised his own son to become a doctor who immigrated to the United States.

She didn’t know the groundwork she was laying with that one seemingly simple act of involvement in one person’s life.”

Beyond Mabel’s choice to take responsibility for another’s education, Matt was struck by his own responsibility to honor that legacy by making the most of life and reaching his full potential. “I felt charged with carrying the mantle and making sure that all of her effort didn’t go to waste,” he says. “It felt like my responsibility to do something significant with my life. It gave me the feeling that I was part of something larger than myself—a feeling I was part of something meaningful, which a lot of people struggle to find, I think. We need something that drives the competitive juices that evolution has given us. Ensuring that my predecessors’ efforts weren’t in vain gave me real motivation to make sure I paid attention in school, and to make sure I didn’t disappoint all the people that were quietly watching and hoping that I would carry on what had come before me.” Now a Managing Partner at The JBG Companies, an investment management firm, owner, and developer poised at the forefront of the Washington real estate market, Matt’s fierce desire to achieve success to honor the past lends an arc of meaning to his life’s pursuits that has guided him well.

The JBG Companies was founded in 1960 as a law firm, but the partnership soon began investing in real estate deals and eventually evolved its core business to include real estate in the Washington metropolitan area.

This continued through the mid-1990s, when JBG put together the first private equity fund for the purpose of investing in real estate in its market. Now, fourteen years later, JBG is poised to raise its ninth fund. “We’re a combination real estate investment firm and real estate services company,” Matt says. “Development is our biggest component, which includes tearing down, redeveloping, and repositioning office, residential, hotel, and retail buildings. We appeal to investors W. Matt Kelly

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because we’re focused in one local market, and because we’re the only intermediary between our investors and real estate.” Larger, more well-known funds, by contrast, invest in companies like JBG and bring along layers of extra fees. Through its unique, no-nonsense model, JBG has earned the trust of large institutional investors, endowments, charitable foundations, and high net worth individuals. It employs about 500 people who add value doing the work that requires its team’s active attention and pays real returns.

“For me, it’s a much more interesting way to invest because of the hands-on nature of what we do,” Matt explains. “Prior to coming to JBG, I was an analyst at the bottom of the totem pole but saw how the business worked at a classic private equity investment firm called Thomas H. Lee Partners. There, and at other firms like it, the model is to give money to smart management teams and let them create all the value. Your job is to try to pick ‘em right. If it doesn’t work out, you can’t just insert yourself and fix things—you have to find another team to insert and fix things because you did a poor job picking in the first place. To me, that seemed like a very disconnected, removed way of investing, and that’s why we do it differently at JBG. We aim for the best of both worlds, staying hands-on and entrepreneurial on dealby-deal basis while maintaining the ability to invest in multiple transactions and deals.”

Matt’s hands-on, connected approach stems from his upbringing in St. Louis by parents who grew up poor and always wanted their children to appreciate the value of whatever they were able to achieve in life.

Although his parents were financially secure, they were careful about spending money and made sure their children appreciated the value of a roof over their heads and food on the table. Instead of the typical beach vacations most of his friends’ families enjoyed, Matt’s parents opted to spend most of their family vacations on the road, piled into a van or station wagon, exploring America’s sights. It was done in part to make sure their children grew up down to earth, but also to make sure they knew as much as possible about the country they lived in. They were acutely aware of the messages their choices communicated to their children, from the way they traveled to the lifestyle they lived, and always made sure to do things for the right reasons. Thanks to their many road trips the Kelly family grew up close-knit and well-traveled, and Matt has now visited 49 of America’s 50 states.

Amidst the traveling that characterized his childhood, Matt developed a childhood lawn mowing business, complete with business cards. Later, while 86

attending college at Dartmouth, he got a job as a UPS driver during the holiday season. “It was a monthlong gig, and as a commercial driver, I was to drive out to businesses, factories, and warehouses to pick up shipments,” he remembers. “It was a neat job, giving me the opportunity to work with a lot of Type A, driven, hardworking people who were career truck drivers. I quickly realized that the only real difference between them and me was the luck of where we were born and what we were born into. These guys were working their asses off and were as focused on details as I am in my job now, but they had finished high school at best, and so they didn’t have the benefit of education.

There aren’t a lot of UPS truck drivers at Dartmouth, so it was such a valuable experience for me to spend that kind of time with such capable people who lacked only luck in their lives but who had to work so hard just to make ends meet.” Getting to know his fellow truck drivers confirmed for Matt what his father had always told him—that the blessings he was born with were a privilege that carried the responsibility to make the most of them.

But how best to do that? Matt had always wanted to be a doctor like his father, but one summer, when they reviewed the course catalogue together, his dad remarked that he’d never heard someone so unenthusiastic about their career path. It hadn’t occurred to Matt to ask himself whether he was really interested in medicine or not. It wasn’t until, as a sophomore, he and his father went on a hunting trip in Wyoming that he found his answer. “You can’t take me with you,” his father had said. “One day, I’m going to die, and you’ll be left with the choices you’ve made. If you do something because you think it’s what I want, or that it’s somehow connected to me, you’re not going to be happy.” With that, he changed his major from Biology to History and Spanish. “I waded into my new majors blindly, but I knew that because it was my own thing, I’d figure out where I wanted to go with it. I’d heard the biggest complaint from people who had graduated from college and studied business or econ was that they didn’t spend more time in college studying liberal arts, so I took that advice. You have your whole life to become an expert in business or economics, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to study something that you can’t easily do while you’re working all the time?”

Upon graduating from Dartmouth, he went to work at Goldman Sachs in New York City as an Analyst in their Leveraged Structured Finance Group. “When I accepted the position, I didn’t know what those words meant,” he laughs now. “Suffice it to say, I learned a lot

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

there, and among the greatest lessons was that I didn’t like being on the outside. As outsiders, we would advise corporate clients, who would then do whatever they wanted. So it was a great learning experience, but not what I wanted to do.”

One such client was Thomas H. Lee Partners, where Matt worked after Goldman until 2000 when he joined the wife of a Thomas Lee associate at a tech start-up. In that capacity, he served as the de facto CFO, developing software to augment established but outdated software in the radio and television ad sales industry. “We failed miserably to raise money from venture capitalists, and instead found support from an angel investor, who invested some cash and some in-kind services from a market research and focus group testing business he owned,” Matt explains. “We took exhaustive advantage of this for nine months as we came up with the right product. In the end, because we never raised money at a high valuation, we were cheap for the next investor to buy. One of Thomas H. Lee Partners’ portfolio companies acquired us for a relatively small sum that was significant to us, but small to them, and without any venture investors telling us the price wasn’t high enough, we accepted.”

While a great success, the experience taught Matt that he didn’t like putting all his eggs in one basket.

“It was fun, but it was also a high risk proposition,” he acknowledges. “If it worked, it would be great, and if not, then that’s it.” Having tried his hand at traditional financial jobs and a successful start-up, Matt decided to go to business school to figure out his next move, which led him to Harvard Business School.

Matt enrolled in 2002 and graduated in 2004. During that time, he studied as many different businesses as he could, and found that he was particularly intrigued with real estate. “It seemed to me that each and every real estate deal could be understood as its own handson entrepreneurial opportunity,” Matt explains. “There was a lot of fragmentation, and the industry wasn’t dominated by certain players. I liked the potential for investment upside in the private equity model, but I didn’t like the hands-off nature of picking a team, winding them up, and hoping for the best; I wanted to be in the trenches, doing things myself.”

When Matt joined JBG in 2004 as an Associate fresh out of business school, he originally thought the operation would be a great place to learn for a few years, but would ultimately prove too large an operation to satisfy his entrepreneurial tastes long term.

However, after attending conferences and other real estate industry events, he quickly noticed something

interesting—a generational gap in the attendees that he sat square in the middle of. “I think that, because of the crash in the late 1980s and early 90s and the length of that recovery, as well as the distraction of the dot-com boom in pulling people who might have gotten into real estate away from this industry, real estate really suffered a generational loss from about 1989 to 2003, when it started to become popular again,” he reasons.

“When put next to the promise of untold fortunes in the dot-com boom, real estate was not a sexy industry, but I was drawn to the idea of actually seeing the fruits of my labor rise from groundwork into the air in the form of transformative, lasting structures. Combine that with the chance to remake how cities function and how people live, work, and play, and it appealed to me on so many levels.”

Thanks to this sequence of events, Matt found himself making his way in an industry that was long on mentors and people who wanted to see him succeed. “When your boss is five to ten years older than you, there is a bit of competitive tension there,” he points out. “But when your boss is twenty or thirty years older, he or she wants you to get up the curve as fast as possible so that you can lighten their load and either let them retire or work less.” Matt certainly benefited from the luck of these demographics, but as Louis Pasteur said, serendipity favors the prepared mind. Much more than luck, Matt’s passionate pursuit of success brought him to JBG and laid the groundwork for his future there.

He became an owner in 2007, and became a member of the firm’s five-person Executive Committee in 2008.

“Our leadership team has a great dynamic,” he remarks.

“A lot of deference is given to experience and to the notion that your returns are as much driven by the deals you do as by the deals you don’t do. Some votes can be contentious, and we’ll have vehement business debates and sometimes arguments, but it almost never gets personal. It all ends up on the table, and nothing is done without full awareness.”

As a leader, Matt emulates his parents’ philosophy of leading by example. “People follow what you do much more than what you say,” he affirms. “Even when I was an Associate right out of business school leading a team of Analysts working on a project, I would stay late if they had to stay late. That motivates people a lot more than telling them they’ll get an extra five thousand dollars in their bonus. It makes them want to do a good job for you because they can see you really care about them and are looking out for them. I’ve been in their shoes and I know what it’s like to work extremely long hours for someone else.”

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Matt also remembers well what it feels like to be in the shoes of young people entering the working world today, and to them, he highlights the importance of working with good people over the allure of working for a big-name company. “It’s really hard to know what it is you want to do in life,” he relates. “Colleges don’t really give you exposure to jobs. They teach you how to learn and how to teach yourself things, but you have no idea what it’s like to be a money manager or an engineer when you’re in school. With that in mind, my advice to young people is to try to work with good people wherever you go because you can learn from them. You can take a job somewhere just because it has a good name or pursue a certain industry or sector just because it’s hot at the moment, but I think getting overly caught up in those things can be a waste of time. Working with fundamentally good people, however, is never a waste of time.”

In striving to make the most of his time, Matt prioritizes helping others, just as Mabel made a point to help his grandfather all those years ago. Beyond donating financially to various charities, he has been particularly involved in Ayuda, an organization launched almost four decades ago and named for the Spanish word for help. Ayuda is a team of dedicated, socially conscious attorneys who help people who were brought to America against their will, either as victims of human trafficking or as the children of illegal immigrants. “Ayuda’s biggest constituency is domestic violence victims whose lives would be in jeopardy if they went back to their own country,” Matt explains.

Making the most of his time, as well, involves taking moments to consciously connect to the people around him, or to the memories of those that brought him here.

These moments are often spent with friends and family,

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deep in conversation around the fire pit in his own backyard. “Much more valuable than where you go or what you do is who you spend your time with and how connected you are to people,” he avows. “A lot of the memories we cherish most in life involve people and experiences we love. For me, the biggest part of that is my wife Jessica and our kids.”

Matt’s wife shares his values and takes great care, as he does, to be vigilant in the things they communicate to their two young sons, Hancock (named for Mabel) and Angus (named for Matt’s mother’s side of the family). “She’s an incredible partner,” he says. “She does so much to keep the train running and does more to make sure we’re happy as a family than I even realize.

We’re both very Type A and detail-oriented, so when we’re too critical of situations we see around us, we keep each other in check and remind each other of how lucky we are. I really value that.”

So far, Matt’s legacy has certainly been oriented toward honoring the past, making the most of the good will, drive, and sacrifices made by those that came before him so he could have the opportunities he has today. Yet his life is lived just as much for the present, and for the future. “I often read about people who’ve done a lot with their lives, and many of them didn’t really get going until after the age of 40,” he reflects.

“Having just turned 40, and with everything I’ve done so far, I ask myself, is it just groundwork for everything I’ll do next? It not only makes what I’ve done so far seem relatively humdrum, but it also makes me wonder what else I might be able to do with the opportunities I’ve been given in my life.” After all, in an ever-evolving world and for people always striving to achieve their full potential, isn’t each great accomplishment only groundwork for the next?

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Joshua Konowe Strength of Character Josh would hesitate before putting his own son through many of the childhood trials he experienced himself. But looking back, it’s clear that these challenges helped make him the man and business leader he is today. Indeed, protectionism now reins in the philosophy of child rearing, but for Josh, the gauntlet of experience that shaped the strength of his character stems from the same place as his entrepreneurial instinct: his father.

For a few years in the 1980s, Josh’s father, who was a clinical psychologist by training, ran the largest distributor of floppy disks in the US. At first, he put his young son to work boxing, labeling, and stuffing envelopes.

“In the beginning,” Josh remembers, “it was just shrink wrap and envelopes. But it wasn’t long before I was sweating in the basement on another project.” After being outmaneuvered by larger operations, Josh’s father created a company called David and Goliath, which recycled computer parts.

Starting with shells of computers, they would rebuild them with new parts in his garage, and then resell them with more memory, faster speeds, and other features.

“That was when my education really began,” Josh affirms. “My dad would call me down to the basement so we could solder motherboards together. I would never take my own kid down to solder motherboards.

The fumes alone! But you didn’t know back then—you just opened the window and did it.”

Josh’s early start with computers and hardware formed a strong foundation for the eventual explosion of information technology. But beyond technical skills, Josh learned a more valuable lesson from his father’s ventures. “From him, I learned how to take risks,” Josh says. “Even if they ended up in failure. It was something he had a passion for.” Now the cofounder and CEO of Uppidy, a text message archiving, search, and retrieval platform that allows people to own their own data, Josh reflects back on those early experiences as the foundry within which his strength of character was forged— the strength of character so critical to entrepreneurial success today.

Equally influential, Josh’s mother taught him the opposite, demonstrating the importance of stability and being fiscally cautious and vigilant. “My mom was much more conservative,” Josh says. “She was smart with her money, saving it in a nest egg that she never touched.

My dad was completely different. Even though he was a psychologist, and he always gave steady advise, he was still willing to take a lot of risks and face challenges.

They created an interesting dichotomy for me to learn from as I was growing up.”

It was a dichotomy that, even while Josh was still very young, would become even more pronounced. When he was seven years old, his parents divorced, and very suddenly, Josh had to grow up fast. “Right away, my parents became more like people to me,” he recalls. “They changed from the omnipotent figures most kids that young think of as their parents. But I also realized I was more in control of my own destiny than I had thought.”

Indeed, Josh had more freedom, but with that freedom came more responsibility. On a given day, he could decide if he wanted to be up the street at his father’s house, or down the street at his mother’s. “That may seem like a small decision, but it’s not one a seven-yearold typically makes,” Josh points out. “My own son, who’s six, likes to have us by his side at all times, which is a stark contrast to what I had growing up.”

By the time Josh was in high school, he had spent most of his time living with his mother. His father had continued his entrepreneurial path, and had ended up living in Connecticut. He invited his son to come live with him in a converted cider mill that was attached to a barn and garage, built into the side of a small cliff. “I went to live with my father, and I remember one day in particular, when there was a massive thunderstorm,” he recounts. “A friend and I were in my room, getting into trouble. The storm got worse and worse, and that’s when we heard it.”

Amid the clamor of the storm, a heavy, deep scraping sound carried through the entire house. A two-ton boulder situated in the cliff above the garage had been Joshua Konowe

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knocked loose by the storm, rolling down the cliff face and into the driveway. In his room, Josh and his friend froze, when suddenly, the bedroom door was swung open, and his father stood ominously in the doorway.

“There I was,” Josh says, “wearing my dad’s hippie leather hat, with Led Zeppelin playing loudly. Smoke from my room wafted around him through the open door and out into the rest of the house. My father just looked at me, then shut the door and left without a word. I knew I was in trouble, and that it wasn’t going to end quickly. But I had no idea what I was in for.”

As fate would have it, the massive boulder was blocking in two out of their three vehicles. Josh’s father sent him to the hardware store for a sledgehammer, a pickaxe, and a wheelbarrow, and then laid out his sentence. “For the next few weeks, I was a one-man chain gang,” Josh says. “My mom went ballistic when she heard about it. But I told her that I had made a mistake and that I should pay the price. Meanwhile, I spent three weeks breaking this rock up for hours a day. Just to break it in half took three days. I learned very quickly that you can’t lift several 50 pound pieces off the ground in a row. You need to break each into smaller pieces, or you’ll break your back.”

By the end of the experience, Josh had built up substantial muscle mass, and had earned a place in the family’s epic of child rearing. “My father raised four boys, and to this day, he tells me he wishes he had another rock for each of them,” Josh reports. “In some ways, I needed that rock to help me learn how to become a man. But nowadays, there’s no way anyone would do that to their kid.”

After high school, Josh went to the University of Kentucky, where he struggled academically before finding his way as an upperclassman and graduating with a degree in history. Upon graduating, he moved back to New York and got into radio ad sales. After diligently working for nothing for eighteen months, he began to move up quickly through the ranks, and before long, he had reached a six-figure salary.

“At that point, I was happy to turn that crank,” Josh says. “I was in my late twenties, getting married and buying my first apartment. Why the hell would you change that? You would have to be crazy.”

What came next was perhaps the most significant and pivotal moment for Josh, and it came long after his childhood had ended. But on that day, many of us still had a certain kind of childhood to leave behind.

“On September 11th, 2001, a colleague and I were late to a meeting at Windows on the World,” Josh recalls, referring to the restaurant at the top floor of the north 90

tower of the World Trade Center. “We decided to just blow it off and go get a bagel at a bodega. As we walked in, the first plane hit the north tower, and all hell broke loose.”

Josh watched in horror as the TV in the bodega showed footage of the north tower on fire. Flames erupting from the building were followed by far grislier scenes, by now well known by nearly the entire world.

“It was terrible,” Josh recalls gravely. “Even now, eleven years later, it’s unimaginable to me.”

In the wake of the tragedy, Josh was struck by an idea. “I thought we should give free advertising to our clients for a few months,” Josh says. “Not only was it the right thing to do, but it would build loyalty. Going forward, those clients would never leave us, even in the face of aggressive rate increases.” Josh’s boss was all for the idea, but the company’s owners declined. “I thought they were crazy,” he says. “They expected me to go to lower Manhattan, or to our clients’ temporary offices in New Jersey, and ask them for money just weeks after this horrific tragedy. It was just crazy.”

Josh struggled to recover the steadiness of his pre9/11 life, but a series of funerals of people who had been his clients, on top of moral trepidation over his work, left him depressed and listless. He spent a lot of time in front of the television. “I couldn’t go back to what I was doing,” Josh affirms. “I didn’t feel right. My wife said, ‘You know, you can keep doing this, or you can decide you’re going to do something else, but at some point you’re going to have to get off the couch.’”

Then his father called. He had happened upon a business model that leveraged the internet to tap into the booming real estate market. By generating leads through online ads and turning those over to agents, he was returning on his investment at a rate of 10 to 1. In this new life, far from the address book with so many clients’ names marked out as a constant reminder of the terrorist attacks, Josh could see a way forward.

“Before 9/11, I felt that even though I’d had turmoil in my life, I was on firm ground,” he remembers. “And then I realized there was no such thing. You do the best you can to mitigate risk, but you can’t know what will happen. I decided I wasn’t going to waste what time I had. I decided to give the whole ‘starting my own business’ thing a shot.”

With his wife’s blessing and support, Josh left ad sales behind, took another page from his father’s book, and founded e-Agent, a lead generation platform for real estate professionals. The business was a success, and he served as CEO of e-Agent for five years, until whispers of the housing crisis began to emerge. “I

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

realized that real estate was careening off a cliff,” Josh says. “What was really interesting was that we could see it happening on the internet in the trends of our leads.

We sold because we could see what was coming, and we wanted to be proactive” After e-Agent, Josh founded Brand Click, an intext advertising solution to protect brand names, but Uppidy remains his most promising venture yet.

“Right now, the device manufacturers and carriers are in ownership of your data,” Josh explains. “We’re trying to give that ownership back to people.”

Interestingly enough, the idea came when Josh dropped his phone in the toilet. When he went to AT&T to retrieve the information he had lost, the carrier told him he needed a subpoena. “They had my driver’s license and social security number—everything they might need to identify me,” Josh recalls, exasperated.

“And even if I subpoenaed them, they were only prepared to give me my data printed out on perforated sheets of physical paper. I did what every New Yorker would do, which is get angry and swear and then say, ‘I’m going to go do something about this!’”

Yet unlike every New Yorker, Josh is actually translating that resolve into action, and as a result, his big moment may be in the works. After securing initial funding from contacts in the mobile telecommunications space who were quick to see the ideas value, Uppidy was founded in 2011, and later that year, Josh found further financing in angel and venture capital. Having control of one’s text messages is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to cross-platform social media, and just this summer, a potential buyers’ interest indicated that Josh is on to something real. Uppidy now has users in the range of tens of thousands, and they are rapidly approaching 25 million stored text messages from senders and recipients outside their base, which is approaching half a million in number from 46 countries and in close to three dozen languages.

Today, Uppidy is eager to explore ways to leverage this stored data, but it remains firmly committed to user privacy. “One thing we promise to do is not to go in and look at the raw data with human eyes,” Josh says firmly. “Instead, we plan to strip identifying information and explore trends in topics.”

Uppidy’s future certainly looks bright, but what will Josh’s own future hold once it is built and sold? “I

don’t know if I will build again,” Josh says. “I’ve said that before, but I’m not sure I’m the right candidate to continue doing this kind of work. I think I’ll be better in a role that’s further along. Launching businesses is very stressful and requires a tremendous amount of energy—energy that I have, but would like to focus elsewhere.”

One such place he’d especially like to focus that energy on is his son. His wife is Japanese, and their son is bilingual, going on trilingual. Even at six years old, the young man already runs 5Ks and has traveled to Europe and Asia. “In one way,” Josh says, “I’m jealous of myself on his behalf, of having the tough experiences I had and knowing there’s no way in hell I’ll repeat those for him. And at the same time, I’m able to provide for him in ways my parents couldn’t for me.”

Now, as a parent, Josh knows one of the greatest gifts he can give his son is a good education, and he’s determined to do so. “One of my great regrets is the time I spent screwing up in school,” Josh says. “I should have been a much better student. I should have picked a different path—like astrophysics, which is something I’m really interested in. Everyone was telling me that I was good at it, but either I wasn’t getting the message, or I didn’t want to hear the message.”

In advising young people entering the business world today, Josh also highlights the importance of empathy. “As I get older,” he says, “I’m starting to understand that everyone has gone through their own pain and suffering, and how important it is to recognize that. When you meet people, it should be with the understanding that they’ve probably had something happen before you got there. Be less aggressive and more willing to let things play out, as opposed to forcing them into the place you want. I like to try to shut up and listen. There is wisdom in the joke that God gave us two ears and one mouth.” In recognizing and being cognizant of the trials others have withstood, one is in a better position to understand and grow from one’s own experiences, both good and bad. Indeed, the one thing life can be counted on to provide are both highs and lows; it’s up to the person navigating that terrain to determine how he or she will grow, learn, and build character from it.

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Allan Kullen Against the Odds “Her name is Ester Baumgartner. She’s a Swiss girl who sings, and apparently she lives near here. Do you know her?” Allan Kullen had posed the question over and over in a broken mixture of Hebrew and English to whoever would listen.

Allan had met Ester while on an archeological dig on Masada, in the Negev, Israel. All he knew by the time they parted ways was her name and the fact that she was staying in Tel Aviv. So after finishing his work with the archeologists, he decided to do something unusual.

Equipped with only these few pieces of information, he would try to find her.

Allan hitchhiked his way to Tel Aviv and asked anyone who could understand him, until eventually, despite all odds, he found her.

It wasn’t just Ester he found, however.

“It was at that moment that everything kind of transformed for me,” Allan recalls.

“The odds were none to none that an American speaking broken Hebrew could venture to a foreign city and find some girl he met for two weeks on a mountaintop while only knowing her name. If I could accomplish that, it dawned on me that I could probably do anything I wanted to in life.”

Ten years later, in 1974, Allan tested that conviction by buying a struggling printing company that was stuck in the middle of a check kiting scheme. “They had some issues in their accounting department that made them way overvalued, so the bank ended up owning the company,” he says. “I recommended to them that I go in and take over what was left. I bought it from the bank over a five year period.”

Allan changed its name to Todd Allan and slowly repaired the structure of the company for several years. He replaced old equipment and, with the help of specialists in the field, the company grew strong enough to merge with a book printing company called Federal Lithograph in 1983. At the same time, he also acquired a printing company in Virginia called K&E, which came with five satellite copy centers. “The arrangement allowed us to have a home base with five different feeder operations, which seemed like a terrific

idea on paper,” he recalls. “However, it turned out that the people in Philadelphia that owned the company had actually sold those copy centers to five other people, which created quite a glitch.”

After working through countless setbacks while blending in recent acquisitions, things began to stabilize. This allowed Allan to upgrade the equipment, hire several salespeople, and finally move the company to its current location in Maryland. In 1984, the company received a major boost when a publication he created with other graphic arts vendors was reviewed by the Washington Post. The story advertised them as a $25 million company, rather than the $2.5 million they actually were. “No one saw the correction in the paper the next day, so we got a ton of recognition,” he laughs. “That’s when I learned that, in D.C., perception can have a pivotal influence in the way reality plays out.”

The heightened prestige gave the company a boost that allowed it to further expand and purchase equipment—in retrospect, more than it truly needed. “It’s what you do when you think the world’s never going to end,” he laughs. “Printing was a phenomenal business in town. If you owned a printing company, you had to not go to work in order to not make money. It was stable, and the Government Printing Office facility on Massachusetts Avenue was pushing out work.

Eventually, however, the technology changed. The hot type disappeared, cold type came in, and that started the revolution. The only bad part of it was that the guys doing the computer stuff never talked to the printing industry when they did it. Designers were starting to use programs like PowerPoint, which is a great software, but nearly impossible to print. It just doesn’t convert.”

Despite the shifting technology and fluctuating demand within the industry, and despite going from its peak of 127 employees down to slightly over 50 by the end of 2012, Todd Allan remains a strong, $9 million company today—success it has earned by establishing itself as more than the average printing company.

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“What we sell is time,” Allan says. “Anybody with good equipment can put ink on paper, so beyond that, we sell people the ability to go to sleep at night knowing they’re going to get their product on time. We built Todd Allan around that notion.”

Able to weather the twists and turns of fate that have rendered many printing companies things of the past, Allan has an undeniable natural talent for the industry, which seems as much his own reflexive acumen as it does a product of his personal background. His father owned Kaufmann Printing, a commercial printing company that brought the first offset web press to the D.C. area. In the late 1930’s, his father began working in the industry, delivering proofs and hot metal from typesetters to printers. He worked his way up until, eventually, he ran the business, which he ultimately sold to Publishers Company (Pubco) in the early 1970’s.

Allan was the first member of his Baltimore-based family to be born in Washington, D.C. His mother worked in accounting until Allan and his younger sister came into the family, at which time she opted to stay home with her children. Growing up, Allan spent a great amount of time in his father’s printing plant, so that by age eleven, he was helping out in the stripping and shipping departments. When he was not helping out with his father’s company, Allan would do printing on his own, making programs for dance classes on his own small printing press. “I would go down and get the type, and we’d have little wooden block cuts for hearts and dance figures,” he laughs.

Despite his knack for printing and constant involvement in his father’s company, Allan felt little interest in the industry for most of his childhood. It wasn’t until 1959, when he began attending college at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (now known as Carnegie Mellon University), that he began to open up—not only to printing, but as an individual as well.

Before Allan enrolled at Carnegie, the school had begun its massive transformation from an Institute of Technology to a University. In doing so, all of its industry schools were systematically eliminated, and the last one to exist was the printing school in which Allan was enrolled. It dissolved during his freshman year. “In 1960, the Dean came in and said there was bad news and good news,” he recalls. “The bad news was that they were closing the school. The good news was that, since they had admitted us to the program, we could stay until graduation, but a lot of the printing electives were not going to be around, so we could take anything we wanted on campus.”

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As a result, Allan tried his hand at biology, business, and engineering, which gave him a broader background. He served as editor of the school paper and was elected president of the Intramural Society and Vice President of his fraternity. “I had no direction in high school. I wasn’t very social at all,” he recalls.

“College was when I really grew and broke out of my shell.” He even considered going into the service, so he spent two years in ROTC, but despite having the top academic scores in his class, he was turned away due to flat feet.

Though he had a long list of demanding extracurricular activities, Allan excelled in school, and by the time he graduated, he had several offers for graduate school. He was offered a partial scholarship in Math to the University of California at Los Angeles to become a teacher’s assistant, as well as an opportunity to pursue an MBA from Berkeley. By then, he knew he was destined for the printing industry, so he decided to go to Berkeley. “I thought that, if I was going to go into printing, it would be best to go into management,” he remembers reasoning. “As it turns out, I did just the opposite. When you buy a small company, you automatically become a salesman.”

Upon arriving at Berkeley, Allan realized he had already accumulated a number of applicable credits from his undergraduate studies. After completing a research project that could serve as a thesis while working with one of his professors, he asked to take his comprehensives for his MBA and graduate after his first year. The school resisted, but never explained that if he passed his comprehensives and paid for the second year, he could return the following year and pick up his degree.

Not certain what to do at that point, he joined a Dutch travel group in 1964. “At that time, nobody flew to Europe,” he explains. “When kids went overseas, they would travel six or seven days on a ship, stay for four or five weeks, and then take a ship back as well.

The group that I met with needed somebody to put out a daily newspaper on the ship, so I paid for my travel expenses by working, putting out this mimeographed newspaper.”

To enhance the European experience, Allan landed an internship for a printing company in Amsterdam and traveled as frequently as he could, meeting the Swiss girl that would lead to that fundamental shift in his perception. When he returned to the states after a year, he took additional classes towards his MBA (he still remains six credit hours short) and accepted an offer from his father to work in the book publishing division

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

of the company that acquired his father’s business. “I grew up in the printing industry, but it wasn’t all that I wanted to do, even though I knew it very well,” he says. “So instead, I accepted an offer from Pubco to help create and produce encyclopedias. I did a couple of other things on the side, like selling for a company with a new concept in photographic reproduction. I worked with a company that put designs on sunglasses and sold them through a motorcycle distributer. I knew I could do anything I put my mind to, so I took that chance in life to put my mind to as many things as I could.”

After working at Pubco for a number of years, Allan began the brave and bold process of piecing together Todd Allan—a journey that seemed extremely risky at the time, but somehow flourished into a company that would become a leader in its field. And while Todd Allan’s future remains bright, Allan hesitates to say where the path of the printing industry will go. “It’s hard to say, so you have to remain flexible and vigilant,” he says. “In the old days, people would just keep taking the used equipment and run it until it wouldn’t run anymore. But now, all that stuff is heading out of the country. So I’m not sure how the industry will evolve next. There will always be ink on paper, no question about that, but there may not be as much, and we may have to find some other niche to work in. It’s either that, or consolidate with another firm.”

One way Allan has managed to keep his company’s edge is though creative side projects. While he was at Pubco, he noted that when business was slow, one of the company’s vendors would print bibles, dictionaries, classics, and other educational material, which they then sold door-to-door. He saw value in that strategy and brought it to Todd Allan by buying an Ellis Island program called The First Experience, which featured a collection of photographs and texts of immigrants coming through Ellis Island. “I already saw the value of producing educational material and printing it while a company was slow, so I decided to make it a sideline of business,” he explains. “I also wanted to do it because, while I was in Europe, I saw things I was never exposed

to in school. Those experiences made me really excited about history, and I wanted to share that enthusiasm through my business.”

The program did so well that Allan quickly discovered a demand for trainers to teach the material, so it was expanded and evolved into Americans All®. It continues to thrive, and Allan is now transforming it again.

The new entity will produce state- and grade-levelspecific social studies resources and online databases with comprehensive information on the history of the United States. The program will also offer, at no cost to schools, professional development programs for teachers to learn how to better use resources in their classrooms. In keeping with Allan’s affinity for history, it will also include revenue-generating opportunities for schools that reveal and preserve America’s heritage and legacy.

While Todd Allan is undoubtedly a great lifelong success, Allan quickly identifies his family as his greatest achievement. “Diane, my wife of forty-four years, and I have two children and five grandchildren,” he says. “Despite all we’ve been through, she’s kept life normal. She never got involved with any of my business ventures, but she certainly supported them and me.”

To be sure, Allan’s career has not come without setbacks, but he managed to persevere despite the odds that may have been stacked against him. In advising young people entering the business world today, he encourages finding a passion, as it becomes one’s greatest asset to fight against problems one encounters.

“You’ve got to have something to drive you,” he says.

“From my perspective looking back over 70 years, the day you’re born is the day you begin to die. That’s the pragmatic part. You already know your beginning date, but you’ve got no idea what the ending date is, so all that’s left is what’s in between. You want to look back and know your life was full.” Indeed, that fullness is built through the journey, whether it’s weaving through the streets of a strange city in search of a girl named Ester, or navigating the curve balls of an unpredictable industry. For through that journey, you don’t just find yourself—you build yourself.

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Bill Lauer Making It Happen When Bill Lauer was five years old, he opened a modest business selling candy in front of his house. He purchased the candy for a nickel, and he sold it for a nickel. It didn’t take him long to realize the unnecessary tightness in his margins, however, and he upped the price to seven cents.

With that adjustment, an entrepreneur was born.

Bill acquired a paper route and would shovel snow in the winters. Thoughtful, vociferous, and innovative, he was a leader amongst his peers. He didn’t follow trends; he set them. By the time he turned thirteen, he had saved up enough money to invest in his ultimate dream: a car.

The boy reasoned with his parents that, as long as he drove on private roads, the venture would be legal, so they let him purchase a Jeep convertible. Now the founder and President of Tetra Partners, a full service real estate and development company that has played a vital role in laying the foundations of communities around the D.C. metropolitan area, Bill has owned 132 cars since that first Jeep, demonstrating the kind of commitment to and achievement of his passions that has become a hallmark of his career. “I love to take an idea and make it happen,” he affirms today. “It’s what drives me. That’s why my lawyer calls me the developer of last resort. I take projects that people say can’t be done, and I do them. Everyone knows that, if they need an innovative thought on how to make something work in real estate, they can come to me.”

Bill started in the homebuilding business in 1969 when he landed his first job in real estate working for his “double-mentor,” Jim Todd, at the Yeonas Company.

Bill then went to work for another homebuilder, which was coincidentally acquired by the Yeonas Company shortly thereafter. By that time, Jim had moved on to serve as President of an oil company called Gulf Reston, and he soon called Bill to offer him a job as Vice President of Marketing. “That was the turning point in my career because, in the early days of Reston, there was no market,” Bill remarks. “It hadn’t been built yet. When the oil company had a period of relative

quiet and decided it would purchase the 7,400 acres of Reston and try its hand at real estate, I was there to learn.” Having no real estate expertise themselves, Gulf Reston had hired Jim Todd, who hired Bill. “It was a huge amount of money and a huge undertaking, but we didn’t have a market, so Gulf was essentially the major developer and owner of the entire project,” Bill explains. “We were building houses, the country club, the hotel, the golf courses, the warehouses, the shopping centers—each endeavor was one we hadn’t yet taken, but were thrilled to drive into.”

When he was hired, Bill’s job was to get all the new residential and commercial spaces sold and leased, and though many of those challenges were new to him, he succeeded. “That total immersion taught me everything from property management to country club construction,” he recalls.

“It was a melting pot of opportunity that you can’t get anywhere. When it comes to real estate, there’s no school better than the School of Hard Knocks, and I was enrolled in advanced courses.”

Bill worked in that capacity for about nine years but had always considered doing something on his own. That’s why, when Gulf decided it was time to sell the enterprise to ExxonMobil and Bill had the opportunity to stay or go, he knew it was time to take a leap. “I knew there was a chance I might not have any income at all for two years, but I needed to do it,” Bill affirms. “I had developed an array of skills, and just like with my cars, I needed to use them or lose them.

I needed to concentrate on my business plan and on the two areas of expertise I had honed over the years— areas that I felt were niches in the market.”

Looking for a niche—an area of expertise that isn’t oversaturated—is a mainstay of Bill’s approach to business, and he had found the first one in his natural affinity for commercial real estate. His skills and innate grace in that market set him apart from his peers and led him to decide that his main business would be land brokerage. “I had a good research model for finding lots, which offered homebuilders an alternative to working with large master developers,” says Bill.

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“Furthermore, I knew everybody, and in this business, knowing people is the key.”

At that time, Bill was also working with a lawyer in Reston who wanted to buy one of his properties and turn it into a restaurant. Bill suggested that he instead pursue a larger project that would turn the property into an office condominium, and the lawyer hired him to make it happen. With that, the two penniless years Bill had prepared himself for were suddenly transformed into a period of unexpected prosperity.

That, coupled with his robust land business, set the stage for his remarkable success, even in those earlier years.

After two failed marriages during that time, Bill had also finally met the love of his life: Rosemary, who had five children. He then brought each of those children into the company in addition to the two biological children he had already hired, and with the constant workings of young, ambitious, and innovative minds, Tetra expanded further. “My whole theme has always been marketing, and I aimed to instill in my kids some acumen in that regard,” Bill explains. “I hope they benefited as much from working for Tetra as the company benefited from the diversity of perspective and vigor of spirit that they offered as members of the team.”

Time passed, and before long, the Tetra team changed locations and began looking for niches again.

For one thing, Bill had noted that the complexion of the homebuilder had changed completely. What had once been individual entrepreneurs was transformed into REITs and Wall Street—entities that came in to purchase ample property to set up their own real estate and land divisions to “feed the engine.” Tetra backed away from that market somewhat and started a retail division after purchasing a shopping center, blazoning a new trail for itself and its clientele. Bill also noted the writing on the wall that a recession was looming, so he decided to stabilize cash by building up a niche boutique property management company specializing in office and commercial condominiums.

After the economic crash of 2008, Bill launched an investment division, knowing that people would retreat back to real estate at some point in the future. He’s also exploring a niche interest in marrying technology and real estate by setting up a division to work on data centers—an experiment that Tetra may or may not pursue. “There is also a pent-up demand for residential housing of all varieties because everything coming out of the pipeline right now is high density and high price—we’re talking high-rises by metro stops,” Bill 98

details. “That market is way oversaturated, so we’ve been working for a while to position ourselves ideally for the shift that’s sure to come. We have a unique methodology for identifying the product, so that’s our latest thinking in niche action.”

Bill has lived in the D.C. metro area all his life.

His parents were in the parking lot business, and his father was a successful entrepreneur who owned a lot across from the Mayflower Hotel in downtown D.C. Bill attended a private preparatory school and had a photographic memory as a child. “I never even owned jeans until I went to college,” he recalls. “My father tested automobiles for General Motors, and he took me out for drives when I was thirteen. We were a very proper family, but also very close.” As Bill grew up, the Lauers moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, and then to Rockville. He attended the University of Maryland and launched an extremely successful business parking cars for country clubs. Then, during the Vietnam War, Bill’s deferment ran out, so he joined the Coast Guard reserve.

When Bill was released from the military, he married and began working for a property management company in DC before receiving a call from a friend about the Yeonas Company. At that time, Yeonas was one of the biggest and most prominent homebuilders in the market, boasting a highly innovative and entirely unique approach that was otherwise unheard of in the industry. That’s when Bill met Jim Todd, came to work for him, and became his top salesperson. “Real estate had always fascinated me, and it was how my father had survived,” Bill said. “Still, I couldn’t have told you that this is where I’d end up. I’m extremely lucky that I started to work for who I did and when I did. I was able to learn an incredible amount and advance my career at a highly rapid pace.”

Life was good until the family’s wealth ran out, and eventually Bill’s parents sold their house and moved into a condominium. Bill was in his late twenties when his father died, and he cared for his mother and aunt until they passed away as well. Deepening that period of loss, his younger brother died at a relatively young age. “Despite the hardships, life’s lessons are good,” Bill still holds. “I was reminded of the importance of giving back and helping others in times of need.”

Indeed, Bill drew from the sadness of loss a strength of will that deepened his already staunch resolve to give back to the less fortunate. Having built houses for Joe Gibbs’ Youth for Tomorrow and Ronald McDonald House, the drive to give back had been sown into Bill’s DNA. A member of the board of Reston Interfaith, he

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

served on the Affordable Housing Task Force launched

by Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia, working to provide avenues for low-income families to rent and own homes. He served on the governing board of the Partnership to Prevent and End Homelessness, helping Fairfax to distinguish itself as one of the few communities to actually reduce homelessness during the Great Recession.

When Bill met his wife, Rosemary, the two actually had nothing in common except for their mutual love of charity. Rosemary had launched a nonprofit of her own called Devotion to Children, whose mission Bill backed with his characteristic zeal for change and community betterment—to the point that he was given the organization’s Community Legacy Award in 2012. So compelling were these philanthropic acts that Congressman Connolly immortalized them in the Congressional Record for the Second Session of the 112th Congress, honoring Bill in the pages of history for a lifetime of contributions to the community.

Today, Bill leads Tetra with a philosophy that steers clear of abrasive self-promotion and a take-noprisoners approach, instead allowing the numbers to speak for themselves. “It’s a matter of insight and experience,” Bill advises. “If you go in and lay the gauntlet down, you’d better be prepared to go. I used to be that way, but experience has taught me to take a more measured, balanced, controlled, modest approach.” In a business as high-risk as real estate, this philosophy plays a fundamental role in leveling out the waves of fortune and keeping Tetra afloat even when markets

are bad. “I think the company is really on-target to get back into markets we were in before, as well as new markets,” Bill affirms. “There’s an energy you can feel that we’re really moving in the right direction. As long as the economy doesn’t go down the tubes again, I think we’ll fare very well.”

As a real estate developer, Bill finds great comfort in the fact that the land and development he’s accomplished in his life will live on for centuries after he’s gone. He doesn’t just have to dream about his legacy—he can see it before him now, with his own eyes. “I turn seventy this year, and I still have more energy than 90 percent of the people I know,” he remarks. “I love every day because I immerse myself in every day. Because of that, I learn every day. I’ve never had two days in a row that are the same.”

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Bill points to work ethic as an important character trait that seems to be disintegrating in the younger generation today. “With the way the world is going, young people are losing their will to work hard just as it’s becoming most important,” he points out. “You can’t count on company pensions or government subsidies anymore. It’s of paramount importance to work hard, save money, and put away a nest egg, and to do so without relying on anyone but yourself. It’s important that young people not lose their core values, from writing to ethics. Focus on your character, your career, and your family first, and you’ll make it happen—whatever ‘it’ you may be pursuing at the time.”

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Marissa Levin A Culture of Worth The day Marissa Levin’s boss told her she would never be worth more than $34 thousand dollars was the day she decided that, in that capacity, her days and potential were limited.

Marissa had been feeling undervalued at the small consulting firm she was employed with for quite some time, and rather than complain or demand a raise, she spent long hours researching the revenue she brought in to the company, her education level, and her experience in an impressive effort to quantify her value to that organization and worth in the marketplace. She had compiled compelling arguments for why she deserved more credit and respect than she was being given for her work, but her boss leaned back in his chair and told her that she would never, be worth more than $34,000.

“My mother used to tell me that no one could determine my personal worth or value,” Marissa comments today.

“Before that day, I never really grasped the significance of what she meant, but in that moment, it clicked. I realized that, while I still wasn’t clear about what I wanted for my career, I knew I did not want to work for someone who undervalued me.”

It was a turning point for Marissa, and within weeks, she started her own company from her home.

Indeed, if she couldn’t find a culture of worth at her previous workplace, she would create one herself. “I literally started it because, if I was going to be working 15 hour days, I wanted to be learning, growing, and doing as much as I could for someone who appreciated my worth and trusted me—and that person was me,” she says. Luckily, she was able to network her way to a $35,000 contract writing an online help system for a utility cooperative. She made more during that threemonth contract than she did in a year at her previous employer, and from that point on, her business continued to grow.

Today, that fledgling business has matured into Information Experts, a strategic communications, human capital, and training firm dedicated to helping

clients access knowledge and skills they need to better perform their jobs and achieve the organizational mission. Having recently passed the $10 million mark, Information Experts works predominantly with federal agencies, as well as with the private and nonprofit sectors. Today, one of the ongoing programs it supports is the design and development of web-based and classroom-based instruction for the procurement system of one of the largest federal agencies. “Anytime an organization implements any type of system to automate a process, there will be a training requirement, a change management requirement, and a requirement for a communications strategy,” Marissa explains. “We provide all of these services to ensure learners have access to the information they need to perform their jobs well, and to support the mission of the organization. We do the design, development, and implementation of the online learning with an emphasis on the user’s experience so that the training is very intuitive. Today, there tends to be so much information that the critical pieces can get lost when it’s all trying to be digested at once. We alleviate this by bringing the most essential training to the user, so they only get what they need when they need it.”

When the company was started in 1995 when Marissa was 27 years old, eLearning and online learning had yet to be developed, so adult learning and training was still conducted in instructor-led classrooms. “When I first started, I wasn’t knowledgeable or experienced enough to understand how the work I was doing fit into a specific strategy,” she confesses. “I definitely learned over the last twenty years how the big picture fits together, and now I can’t look at anything without taking a strategic perspective.”

In many ways, she was forced to quickly adapt to the nature of her new company when, in 1999, the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, made the declaration that eLearning would be a giant force on the internet. This affirmation effectively transformed the education field overnight. “We went from only doing classroom-based Marissa Levin

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learning to only doing eLearning online,” she recalls.

“We had to learn how to do it immediately, because if you didn’t do it, you became irrelevant and went out of business. That was a huge lesson in business for me— that you have to respond to market shifts instantly or you’ll be out of the game.”

In June 2011, Marissa started a second company, a solo endeavor that allows her to connect with business leaders to help them remove the roadblocks impeding their ability to grow as a company. “A handful of CEOs have hired me to identify what’s holding their company back, and to then implement strategies to help them move forward, such as building an advisory team or board,” she explains. “My passion is helping these business owners, and I think I have an edge over other coaches out there whose only business is coaching.

Unlike them, I’ve had employees, and I’ve scaled a business. I’ve personally been through the struggles and pains of big company growth. I’ve been through 9/11 and the market collapse, as well as a multitude of personal problems that have conflicted with my business. What I’ve found is that business owners want coaches who have been through all that. There’s a certain level of comfort knowing they share those experiences. I constantly reach back to my 18 years of leadership experience to help other business owners excel. I don’t just talk about resilience—I live it.”

Her new work inspired her book, Built to SCALE: How Top Companies Create Breakthrough Growth Through Exceptional Advisory Boards, published in early 2012. The book outlines her concept of SCALE, a model for privately held business owners to build an advisory board. “It stands for Select, Compensate, Associate, Leverage, Evaluate, Evolved, and Exit,” she explains. “It’s a full end-to-end model to help business owners find the people they need to surround themselves with to get to the next level of growth.”

Since publishing the book, SmartCEO Magazine asked her to write a monthly column called “Get On Board,” which launched in February of 2013.

In many ways, it is no surprise that Marissa holds such a deep passion for helping others succeed, since she comes from a family whose values are deeply rooted in community and service. Her father worked for NASA for thirty-five years as Chief for the Office of Commercial Programs, and her mother worked at one of the largest homeless and AIDS shelters in Baltimore City as a financial controller for People Aiding the Traveling and Homeless (PATH). “I inherited my commitment to service from my parents,” Marissa readily avows. “My father had a very big job 102

where he helped to stand up the SBIR Program and was a huge mentor to minorities at NASA. He was also instrumental in standing up one of the first entrepreneurial incubators in Baltimore City. As well, my mother advocated for the homeless in the 1990’s when there were a lot of misconceptions about AIDS. She was there helping them every day.”

This deeply rooted value of bettering society underpins the currents of success that permeate Marissa’s family. Her father played a pivotal role in NASA’s contribution to medical devices, including the implantable defibrillator and the implantable insulin pump. He was also responsible for overseeing the transfer of NASA technology to non-aerospace usage.

Marissa’s oldest brother, Craig Friedman, is now a physician and co-owner of a surgery center, while her other brother, Sandy Friedman, is an attorney. Both have their own practices, and Marissa always laughs that she is the family underachiever.

Outside of work, her parents dedicated a great deal of time to their Synagogue, which felt like a second home to Marissa. “My parents always told me we had hundreds of aunts and uncles through the synagogue,” she smiles. “We grew up with a huge commitment to the community, to service, and to Judaism, which is something I’ve tried to carry forward with my family today.”

Despite her parents’ divorce when she was twelve, Marissa experienced an ideal childhood. She went to camp, walked to school with her friends, played kick-the-can, ran bases, played capture the flag, and chased down the ice cream truck with her best friends.

She spent most of her time running around with her neighborhood friends and with her two older brothers, who have remained two of her closest friends. As a child, she always loved writing, from short stories to poetry. Her communication skills were strong from an early age, so much so that she often got in trouble in elementary school for talking too much. “In fifth grade, my principal wrote in my yearbook, ‘Quiet the chatter and you will perform miracles’,” she laughs. “I have to say, though, that I think he got it wrong, because I do my best work and make the most impact when I’m speaking and communicating. But as a kid, that didn’t keep me out of the principal’s office for talking in class.”

Her parents always stressed the importance of education, so it was never a question that she would attend college one day. After graduating high school, she attained her undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland in English with a concentration in Shakespeare. She was then hired as a journalist

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

on Capitol Hill for Capitol Publications, where she focused on the telecommunications market. “I was in the courtroom when Judge Harold Greene handed down the modified judgment that broke up AT&T and created the Baby Bells, so that all of the sudden, we had a competitive telecom industry,” she recalls. “That’s what was great about being a journalist on Capitol Hill—I could write news about legislation being made literally right before my eyes.”

Marissa gained invaluable knowledge on the telecommunications market through her journalism job so that she was eventually hired away by a small consulting company that offered training to telecom companies on how to sell their products more effectively. “I knew the regulations, the technologies, and the players, so I knew what was happening in that market,” she says. “I could bring my subject matter expertise and my writing to that field to design and develop the learning programs.” Although that was the same company that would eventually undervalue her work, she’s thankful her experience there for having allowed her to realize her love for the education and adult learning field. “Everything is a stepping stone,” she comments. “Every experience is preparing us to go further, and while I loved my time on Capitol Hill, it enabled me to get the next job, which gave me the knowledge and confidence to ultimately start my own firm. Even my negative experience there helped me start a successful culture in my company to help others.”

Marissa spent roughly three years with the consulting firm, during which time she attained her Master’s degree from Marymount University in Instructional Design and Curriculum Development. She then launched Information Experts, where business steadily progressed to the point that, around the company’s sixth birthday, Marissa found herself at a crossroads.

“I told my husband the business was growing so fast that I could no longer do it myself,” she remembers. “I needed him to come in and help; otherwise, I’d have to start turning clients away. He was a partner at a freight forwarding and logistics firm at the time, but he saw the potential for growth in my industry, so he decided to quit his job and join Information Experts to cover the administrative side of things. We put all our eggs in one basket. There were some incredibly stressful periods, but it worked out, and he’s now the Senior Vice President. I couldn’t have done any of it without him.”

Ever since she started the company, Marissa has never been afraid of asking for help. As an active

member in Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), she frequently hears from and connects with other business leaders to seek advice and support, and the organization’s founder, Verne Harnish, has been particularly pivotal in her success. “Verne helped me realize that my company is really just getting started,” she said. “He reminded me that most companies don’t hit their stride until they reach 25 years old. If you look at Starbucks and Apple, that’s exactly what happened to them. Information Experts is only 18, so we really have only scratched the surface of our potential.” Another essential mentor to her career as a business owner is Herb Rubenstein, an attorney and strategic advisor she met the day after she started Information Experts. “We met at a Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship event, and have been close for the past 18 years,” she says.

“He’s been with me through thick and thin, and knows me better than almost anybody.”

To give back to EO, Marissa is involved in the Accelerator Program, which mentors entrepreneurs in getting over the $1 million mark. She helps to drive membership and works as an accountability coach for a small group from the Accelerator program, which helps keep entrepreneurs on track with their goals. Beyond that, she has launched a structured community service program within EO, which she branded as EO-DC CARES: Community Allstars Responding, Engaging, and Serving. CARES is committed to creating and strengthening the bonds among EO-DC members and providing opportunities for them to “lift where they stand” through meaningful community service initiatives. “EO-DC is the flagship model for other EO chapters to establish a community service outreach initiative,” she explains. “Thus, EO-CARES becomes a standardized component of all EO chapters. I initially got a group together to serve at SOME (So Others May Eat) in D.C., but now we have a movement. We worked the whole kitchen, and it was very impacting.

I sent out a survey afterward and got very positive feedback, indicating that the experience had opened up a new way of thinking for the volunteers. We served 400 people that day, all of whom are the hardest hit out of our society. One lady that I served looked me in the eye and thanked me for treating her with dignity, which really shook me. I believe there is a very fine line between the person that helps and the person that needs help.”

Thus lays the cornerstone of Marissa’s philosophy toward work, humanity, and life at large. Whether she’s lending a hand at a homeless shelter or making a business decision, she remains steadfastly dedicated Marissa Levin

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to a culture of worth, always treating others with dignity and grace. “I believe in leading by giving others what they need and empowering them to succeed,” she says. “I’m more of a collaborative CEO than an authoritative one. I encourage and depend on my executive and leadership team to make good decisions.

That builds an environment of trust. On the flip side of empowerment, however, there comes accountability.

It’s not just empowerment without strings attached.

You have to take action and lead, and no matter what happens on the other side, you have to take ownership for the outcome.”

Despite her impressive career accomplishments and noteworthy knowledge of the business world, Marissa is driven not by financial and professional success so much as she is by her family. “I have responsibilities, like we all do, so I’m driven by the people who depend on me,” she says. “I’m motivated to do well not for myself, but for my employees, my kids, and my family.”

While Marissa hopes for her company to continue to grow and help others, she measures her true success in her sons. “If I can raise two boys who respect women, who are present fathers, and who cherish time with their kids and wife, I will be successful, because they will then pass those values on to their children and create a legacy,” she says. “In the Jewish religion, we

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believe strongly in not just helping our kids, but in also shaping the thought process of the next generation, so that values and integrity have staying power.”

Undoubtedly, Marissa is a product of the same line of thought, since her parents were able to raise three children who all have successful careers, healthy marriages, and kids with a strong value system.

Moving forward, Marissa hopes to continue sculpting her company around the same values she holds in her personal life: dedication to community, service, and helping others while treating them with dignity. With this in mind, in advising young people entering the business world today, she offers the same advice she gives her clients. “Everything in life is a continuum,” she says. “I think people get hung up when they are in the middle of difficulty and challenge.

They need to remember that everything that happens to us is temporary, so as hard and painful as something may be, it is short-lived in the grand scheme of our life spectrum. We must look at the totality of our experiences, rather than measuring ourselves against a single moment in time.” Amidst these temporary difficulties, furthering a legacy of grace by promoting a culture of worth and treating others with respect ensures that those values we hold most dear are the ones that truly last.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Tom Loftus A Wanderer’s Peace When Tom Loftus was five years old, he scanned the bookshelves at his grandparents’ house, looking for an interesting read. To his disappointment, every book to be found was in Samoan, since neither his grandparents nor his mother spoke English as a first language. Not easily deterred, however, young Tom continued to scan the shelves until, at last, he found one readable set of books: an encyclopedia set. The boy read it from beginning to end with little help—not because it was easy, but because his family did not read English.

“Working through the encyclopedia in that way taught me to love challenges for their excitement as much as for their rewards,” Tom remarks today. “It also taught me about everything and everyone, and I was particularly drawn to other cultures. As I learned about those other cultures, I realized how lucky I was.

Whenever things got tough, I thought about a kid in Yugoslavia, or a refugee in Chad. There are always people that are suffering more than me, so I learned to stop complaining and focus on the positives in life.” And finally, it fueled in him a curiosity about the world that left him always looking for the next horizon to pursue. There was a whole world of adventure to be had, and Tom Loftus wanted to experience it all.

Now, as Co-founder, President, and CEO of LS Technologies, LLC, Tom has found the ultimate challenge, and one he will never grow tired of— running his own company. LS Technologies is a thriving government contracting, telecommunications, engineering, and IT medley focused on hardware maintenance across the country, with employees in 26 states. He first envisioned the company during his years working at the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), where he headed five telecommunication enterprises nationwide.

“I had contractor support, but I was fully aware that I knew more than they did,” Tom remembers. “I thought that if I had an expert like me, I could make the work more efficient and focus more on what the government actually wanted me to do. I decided that, if I couldn’t find that company, I would create it.”

When Tom left the government, he brought some of the most knowledgeable engineers and technicians in the business with him in order to create a cradleto-grave telecommunications effort that would install and maintain cable communications for phones, computers, servers, and air traffic control systems.

Since LS Technologies was responsible for the initial installation of the product, customers returned to them for maintenance throughout the product’s lifetime, which allowed the company to provide high-end services at a reasonable price.

While Tom may have finally reached the challenge of his lifetime, the years between reading the Encyclopedia and today have been marked with a drifter’s desire to search for the next step. He would find contentment for a few years, then eventually grow unsettled and move on. This wanderlust of spirit seemed to begin almost as early as his life did. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1955, to his Samoan mother and Irish father serving in the United States Coast Guard. The family remained in Hawaii for just two months after his birth, thus beginning Tom’s lifelong travels. Before finishing third grade, he had attended five different schools in a range of countries that included the Philippines, Japan, Guam, and the United States in Honolulu and Seattle. “It never bothered me,” Tom confirms. “Some people don’t like change, but I found it exciting, and it doesn’t take long for me to get comfortable in a new place. But eventually, I get too comfortable and grow bored. There’s always something to do, but when it gets easy, I want the next step of the challenge.”

Tom, however, is the first to correct himself that the term ‘bored’ is the least fitting of words for his childhood demeanor. Because his father was constantly traveling for the first thirteen years of his life, his mother kept him on a tight schedule. At the time, direct deposit did not yet exist, so the family was forced to stretch their money while they waited for Tom’s father to reach a port and send his payments home. His mother had grown up in a poor home herself, so she was well versed in the art Tom Loftus

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of making do and ensured that her children were free of want. Tom may have only had two pairs of clothes for school each year, but there was always food on the table and a roof over their heads. Her own childhood struggles had taught her the value of hard work and integrity, which she passed on to Tom by expecting him to help the family. Since he was the oldest, he began mowing lawns at the age of eight years old, and over the following years picked beans and tomatoes every summer and worked a newspaper route to help make ends meet.

While Tom enjoyed working for wages, he was quite averse to homework. In his eyes, it was a task for people who needed practice outside of school, and since Tom was a straight A student, he spent his free time doing other things. “I would get A’s on my report card, but the comments said I wasn’t living up to my full potential,” he recalls. He carried the same philosophy into his athletics. In his main sport, Track and Field, he would always win races, but only by an extra step or two, rather than big margins. His parents saw his raw talent, however, and began dreaming early that he would attend the Coast Guard Academy, become an officer, and live a better, more stable life than they had.

While Tom was, in fact, accepted to the Coast Guard Academy, he came to the conclusion just weeks before reporting for duty that he could not bring himself to commit the next nine years of his life to that path so quickly without exploring on his own first. With that, he placed his admission on hold and spent a year riding his motorcycle, camping, and working to earn just enough money to get him to his next destination. After a year of living this nomadic, adventurous lifestyle, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, where he served for five years. Despite his initial hesitation to join the military, the Coast Guard offered him the adventure he was craving, allowing him to sail all over the Orient and South Pacific. The Coast Guard trained him to be an Electronics Technician, a skill that would help him in the future. While he excelled in that discipline, it wasn’t enough to satisfy his need for challenge, so he volunteered to go into the US Navy Diver Program and became the first Electronics Technician Navy Diver in the Coast Guard. Becoming a Navy Diver opened up even more opportunities for adventure, sending him to many of the places he had read about in that encyclopedia at his grandparent’s house all those years ago.

At the age of twenty-five, Tom finished his service and enrolled as a full time student at the University of Washington in hopes of becoming an Oceanographer, 106

which was paid for by the GI Bill. Despite his success in school, however, he left before attaining his Bachelor’s Degree to get married at the age of twenty-seven.

Suddenly, with a house and a wife to provide for, Tom found that his drifter days were over. Knowing he needed a job, he found work through the government at the submarine base in Washington State. “Although it wasn’t the job of my dreams, he didn’t complain,” he remembers. “I’d been raised to understand that nothing in life would be handed to me, so I began at the bottom and slowly worked my way up the ranks of the government.”

Tom eventually took a new job in Florida, where he worked for the next three years before moving to Colorado, where he and his wife were divorced. “That sent me into the only dark days I can remember,” he remarks. “I grew up believing that commitments are for life, so it felt like a failure to me. I was never one to hold on to negativity, however, and with the help of a friend, I learned to let go of what I couldn’t control.”

Now, Tom looks back on the divorce with gratitude, since it allowed him the opportunity to meet his current wife and best friend, Mona. When they met, he lived in Colorado and she lived in Washington, so their relationship evolved slowly over occasional lunches when time allowed. He had joined the FAA by then, and was able to easily transfer to Seattle in order to be near her and her two young daughters.

Tom Loftus, who had been on the move and at great speeds for his entire life, found an unrivaled peace and calm happiness in settling down with his new family, and it was time for his professional life to follow suit.

He took the Professional Engineer Exam and passed, rendering him a licensed engineer. His life was stable, and if he had stayed with the FAA for seven more years, he would have been able to retire comfortably.

But in October of 2000, Tom felt that adventurer’s pull again. Y2K had brought about an exceptionally heavy workload at FAA, and he was eager to redeem eight of the twelve weeks of vacation time he had accumulated during the preceding two years of constant work. His time off was everything he’d hoped for, but when it was time to return, he found he had run out of patience and stamina for the job. It was that old familiar feeling that he had developed from being the son of a military man— that he not only embraced change, but demanded it.

“We moved every three years, and I looked forward to it,” Tom laughs. “I’d enjoy what I was doing for a while, but when I would find myself getting tired of waking up and going to work, I knew it was time to look for something else. When you’re working for someone else,

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you have limitations. You have to do it their way, and the challenges eventually run out.”

Tom wasn’t the only one feeling this way in 2000. A coworker and fellow engineer joined him in the pursuit of the ultimate professional challenge: founding a company. “He liked the inside, paper creation part of the work, while I was more interested in the outside, handson side of things,” Tom recalls of the partnership. With that, LS Technologies was born.

Eleven months passed before Tom saw his first paycheck. Then, when the company had grown to six employees, Tom’s partner found that, due to personal and health issues, he was unable to go on with the effort. He returned to FAA and took his wife, who kept the books, with him. Tom had no choice but to buy his co-founder’s share and hire a business manager. That individual, also from the FAA and with an MBA from Cornell, deserved a higher salary than he could afford at the time, so they compromised by giving him 19 percent of the company.

“His philosophy is like mine, so we built the company without incurring debt,” Tom says of his co-owner. “I’m pretty frugal; I don’t like to owe people money. My wife is that way too. When we want something, we either pay for it right then or save up if we can’t afford it. I believe everyone should learn to live within their means.”

While the benefits may not have shown immediately, Tom’s frugal decisions have allowed LS Technologies to not only survive, but to grow into the thriving company it is today. He expects to close the year at $35 million, with approximately 250 employees. And, with firsthand experience under his belt, Tom has helped with the launch of three other companies. “I’ve warned those founders that starting a company is not easy,” he affirms.

“You spend eight hours helping the customer, and then after those eight hours you build your business.

Expect to work 18 to 20 hours a day and on weekends, and when something has to be done, you don’t have anyone to hand it off to. I’ve been lucky that my wife is so understanding of this, but there have been times I’ve had to cancel vacations because there’s no one else to do what has to be done. You have to do things you don’t like to do, but it’s part of the business, and it pays off in the end.”

To young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Tom also stresses the importance of fierce independence. “If you have a goal in life, don’t depend on anyone to achieve it for you,” he says. “And stay true to your word. If I say I’ll do something for you, even if the factors change, I’ll do it. If I say I’ll be somewhere at a certain time, I’ll be there, even if I wake up sick. I know people who make plans and a few days later say they don’t feel like doing it anymore, but that’s not me. If I say I’ll do it, I will.” Finally, Tom offers the knowledge he has instilled in his daughters—that you must always be responsible for your decisions. “No one else will get you out of it,” he explains. “I think of all the possibilities before I do something, so good or bad, when I make a decision, it’s my fault or my reward.“ As Tom now prepares to slowly withdraw from the company and hand it off to his new CEO, he looks to more adventures in the future, but without the same restlessness. “That void has been satisfied,” he says confidently. “If it weren’t for my wife and my company, I would have left years ago looking for the next challenge.

And now, with my company thriving and my daughters doing well, I look forward to new kinds of adventures— traveling with Mona, spending time with family, and yes, the occasional motorcycle ride around the world.”

In other words, the restless wanderer in him that is constantly searching for the next challenge is at peace.

Tom Loftus

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Gulnara Mirzakarimova The Flame In February of 2012, Gulnara Mirzakarimova returned to her home country, Uzbekistan, for the first time since moving with her family to the United States six and a half years before at age 19. Although she spent her first nineteen years there, in returning she experienced dramatic culture shock.

“When I went back to Uzbekistan,” Gulnara says today, “I realized that you get used to the good things very fast, and you forget about the bad things.”

According to Gulnara, the cultural differences weren’t just customs, the language, or the standard of living. “The country is very bureaucratic, and the pace of work is slow. Here in the United States, we move so fast,” she affirms.

When Gulnara was preparing to move to the United States as a young woman, a friend warned her not to become a workaholic. Seven years later, it’s clear that Gulnara’s fierce work ethic, intellectual ability, and ambition make her more than well-suited for the fastpaced entrepreneurial environment of the United States. In fact, sometimes the U.S. finds itself trying to keep up with her.

Gulnara’s particular talent for math helped fuel her to a 3.94 GPA at George Mason University, where she had enrolled upon arriving in the U.S. Graduating with a degree in finance in 2009, and with summa cum laude honors, she was invited to a leadership training program by Ernst and Young and guaranteed a full-time job offer upon completion. Despite the attractiveness of the offer, however, Gulnara hesitated.

“Sitting in this giant conference room,” she says, “and knowing that I would be offered a position, I was comically terrified.” She wasn’t worried the position would be too challenging. On the contrary, she was put off by the limits she would face on her own ability to influence the company as a whole. “The system seemed broken to me, and I knew I wouldn’t be in a position with enough authority to fix it,” she recalls. “At such an early stage in my career, I wanted to have my hands in the nitty-gritty as soon as possible.” That’s why, when another offer came from First Virginia Community

Bank, only a year old at the time, in which Gulnara would start working with clients in risk management from day one, she was sold.

Although she found the work challenging and rewarding, there was an important aspect that was missing. “For me, it’s very important to be gratified in my work,” Gulnara says. “In finance, I can’t show you how good I am. My bank and my clients are private.”

More than having a hand deep in the workings of a company, she wanted something of her own. “I think it’s human nature,” Gulnara says, “that we need gratification from the things we invest our time and energy into. We see a flame, and that’s what we want to follow.

It’s not just money; it’s something else that makes us get up in the morning and come to work.”

Gulnara knew she wouldn’t be satisfied without that extra spark. That’s why, two years later, she launched a side project, called Two-Side Brain, which would highlight Washington, D.C. technology start-ups. One chilly November night, a few months before her trip back to Uzbekistan, she was up late trying to develop the project, as working full time as a business analyst for First Virginia Community Bank didn’t afford her many daylight hours to make much headway.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, Washington is the city with a bed time. When even Starbucks closes at 8:30 pm on a weeknight, where was Gulnara meant to interview DC’s rising tech entrepreneurs for Two-Side Brain? She was frustrated at first, but soon, Gulnara realized she could turn this challenge into an opportunity. “I realized I couldn’t bring all of these people to my home,” Gulnara explains, “or go to theirs.

So I started a group called 24 Hour Tech City.”

In exploring the tech start-up scene in DC, Gulnara had seen that starting a business from scratch can take every ounce of energy a young entrepreneur can muster, especially when one must also work a full-time job to pay the bills. In developing her own project, Gulnara experienced that at night, one’s own home can be the enemy to getting things done and staying Gulnara Mirzakarimova

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on target. “First of all, there’s your bed right there,” she laughs. “The temptation of sleep is hard to ignore.” In the City that Goes to Sleep, what Gulnara and other start-ups needed was space that was open late, where they could get things done away from the tempting comforts of an early bed time.

Within a couple days of starting 24 Hour Tech City, Gulnara was approached by Andrew Conklin, the founder of DC Nightowls, an organization less than one year old that was attempting the same mission.

With her focus already split between her day job and Two-Side Brain, Gulnara was eager to join a team developing this resource for DC entrepreneurs.

When she first came on as a co-organizer, DC Nightowls would organize once a month co-working sessions in office space around DC and Northern Virginia, from 8:30 pm to midnight. All DC Nightowls members could come use the space and Wifi. But Gulnara didn’t think this was enough. “My first idea was to change the format to once a week, and then to twice a week,” she says. “And instead of ending at midnight, sessions would end between 2:00 and 3:00 AM.” Over the course of the next year, DC Nightowls grew from 100 members to over 600, and as membership grew, new facets of the co-working sessions emerged organically. “Not everybody has a garage to build their company in,” Gulnara says. “But it’s more than just having a space in which to build something. When you put several entrepreneurs in a space together, they start reaching out to each other. They reach out for feedback, and they reach out for new team members, mentors, and customers. It creates an energy and end product that’s more vibrant and more robust than if the entrepreneur works in isolation.” According to Gulnara, this was not initially a stated goal of DC Nightowls. “We were blown away when we realized what was happening,” she avows. “It’s really amazing to me to see, and it’s what drives me to stay there until 2:00 to 3:00 AM, even when I know I have to wake up at 6:00 AM.” This November, DC Nightowls celebrated their oneyear anniversary. 100 members showed up to a space that was provided free of charge because the host is paid through exposure—another benefit that emerged naturally. In looking toward the future, Gulnara has plans to expand the number of co-working sessions per night, and to hold private demo and pitch practice nights.

One of the greatest things about leading the force that is DC Nightowls is the fact that Gulnara’s own 110

ambitions and dreams are free to flourish through the services she provides for members. Indeed, her exposure to the DC Nightowls community has only emboldened Gulnara’s entrepreneurial flame. In February of this year, she became a contributing writer for Tech Cocktail, writing about tech start-ups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. Next year, she plans to leave the financial industry altogether to pursue an old passion. “Back in middle school and high school, I wanted to be a designer,” she reveals. “No matter how much I push that away, it always comes back. It’s tugging on me and pulling on me. I want to create things— beautiful things for people to see and use. Something I can point to and say, look, I made this.” Paying homage to her philosophy that it is human nature to yearn to feel gratified through one’s work, she plans to go back to school to learn design and coding. “When I deliver a web application or some other product of my design, I will see the client appreciate that right there on the spot, and that’s something that will be immensely rewarding for me,” she affirms.

Gulnara cannot credit her family enough for her success. Her sisters helped support her as she made her way through college, and now, Gulnara and one of her sisters take care of their parents and support the other sister in her pursuit of a master’s degree.

Their unwavering commitment to supporting one another stems from the example set by her parents and grandparents. Growing up as young girls in Uzbekistan, the Mirzakarimova sisters knew that the dedication of their family members was the thin line that separated them from hardship and destitution.

“My grandmother survived World War II, hunger, and all the other hardships you can imagine,” Gulnara says.

“She passed away at 90 years old a couple years ago.

My mother, too, inspires me. When I was ten years old and our family struggled, my mother and her strong character shouldered the many difficulties, financial and otherwise, we had to face.” Gulnara also credits her mother with instilling in her the values that have driven her success. “She raised me to put everything into the things I do,” Gulnara avows. “She told me that if you did everything you could in a task, and it didn’t work, then it’s not a failure. If you give something your all, you can walk away from it in good conscience in the end, regardless of the outcome.”

Today, Gulnara’s mother tells her to enjoy every single day, and to get enough sleep. But Gulnara feels driven by a lesson she came to herself. “The biggest thing I learned,” she says, “is to live like there is no tomorrow.”

In advising young people entering the working world

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today, she would also urge the flexibility and open mindedness that she herself employed to navigate life when her direction changed drastically, as it did at some points. “Sometimes people make plans far into the future, and it doesn’t work out that way,” she says.

“I had to learn that the hard way. I love to learn, and because I’m always learning, sometimes I realize that I don’t have to take the same route. My life was flipped upside down several times, sometimes drastically and painfully. I try to learn everything from every single day and every person, and I hope that young people will listen to their hearts and passions—to that flame that will give them true gratification—as they set out on their professional journeys.”

Beyond the passion she feels for her own career,

Gulnara feels driven to help the less fortunate she feels a connection to. In her own neighborhood in Dupont Circle, she has plans to support a kitchen that feeds the homeless in the area. “Giving money is important,” Gulnara says, “and I support St. Jude’s hospital. But I believe too in the importance of physically doing things with your own hands. As it gets colder, that’s where I’d like to help.”

As for Two-Side Brain? Maybe a new dramatic turn is just ahead. “We will see where it goes,” Gulnara says.

“I have learned a lot from it, and perhaps it’s time for me to leave it altogether. Or, maybe I should take a step forward and transform it. We’ll see.” One thing is for certain—wherever she goes from here, Gulnara will be following that flame that’s led her all along.

Gulnara Mirzakarimova

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Sylvia S. Montgomery Figuring It Out Many children would find relocation from Spanishspeaking Puerto Rico to English-speaking Orlando, Florida, to be a grossly jarring experience. But at age nine, Sylvia Susan (Hernandez) Montgomery felt nothing but the thrill of adventure—a hunger to succeed in her new life as her family sought opportunity on the mainland.

Upon arriving in Florida, Sylvia and her younger brother were separated from classmates and placed in an isolated Spanish-speaking classroom, but her parents were adamant that their children receive no special treatment. After all, how would their English skills improve if they were not forced to use them? Sylvia recalls this lesson as an important one in her development. “I learned that it takes work to succeed,” she remembers.

“If something is a challenge, you work harder. You figure it out without taking shortcuts.” In elementary school, Sylvia was already demonstrating the heady mix of ambition, naiveté, and passion for learning that has carried her headfirst through a string of professional successes, each building upon and evolving from the last.

Today, Sylvia is a Senior Partner at Hinge, a business devoted to branding and marketing a wide range of professional services firms, from accounting, to engineering, to architectural, to management consulting. Launched in 2002, the company has evolved drastically since its acquisition in 2010 by Sylvia and her partners. Initially founded as a local design firm, it is now a national force in branding and marketing, well known for thought leadership in the field. In a few short years, the company has blossomed from four employees, to over 20 and growing, and all of that growth is self-funded. “How do we capture the benefit and the value that a professional services firm brings to the table?” Sylvia poses. “You really have to get to the core—what I call the DNA of a firm. We have a series of questions and exercises that we pose to each firm, and the results are always different and thus lead to true differentiators.”

For Sylvia, never content to rest on her laurels or

get too comfortable, the appeal of Hinge lies in taking on the challenge of each new and different client, determining strategies for that specific challenge, and moving on when the work is done. This pattern of taking on, learning, succeeding, and finding something new has been a constant theme through her life. As far back as she can remember, Sylvia’s ultimate professional goal was to be “the boss”. Even as a child, she was adamant about her desire to lead, and to pursue challenges rather than shirk from them. This attitude was encouraged by her parents, and perhaps best encapsulated by their decision to leave Puerto Rico simply because they felt Orlando held more possibility for their two children.

Both parents placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of education. Sylvia’s father was a university professor and taught her early on a love for antiquities and history. His career was cut short when the military called; as a Korean War veteran on disability pay, he spent much of his time writing. Sylvia’s mother was a different kind of driving force, having regretted not being given the opportunity to continue her own schooling beyond the eighth grade and therefore ensuring that her own children got a college education.

After high school, Sylvia embarked on her first solo adventure, leaving Florida for Washington, DC. She enrolled in Trinity College in D.C. with a journalism career in mind, partially influenced by her father’s passion for the written word. As the oldest liberal arts women’s college in the country, Trinity epitomized Sylvia’s latent persona of self-reliance, exceptional commitment to family and life-long friends, love for education, and tenacious work ethic, playing a critical role in her evolution toward achieving her potential.

Though Trinity had no journalism program, Sylvia was not deterred. With the help of her academic advisor, she built her own makeshift program that was supplemented with classes from American University and George Washington University through the college consortium. She majored in visual arts and minored in Sylvia S. Montgomery

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journalism, and along the way, she tackled the financial toll of tuition payments with her signature can-do attitude. “I had a lot of financial aid and student loans, learning early to rely on a variety of work study and part-time jobs to contribute to the college expenses because my parents didn’t have a ton of money,” Sylvia recalls. True to her nature, she identified possible limitations and tackled them head-on, never stopping to wallow in doubt or self-defeat.

After Trinity, it was only a year before she chose to return to school. While working full-time at BNA, a publishing company, she entered George Washington University to pursue a master’s in fine arts with a concentration in visual arts. The program offered a fouryear terminal degree, equivalent to a Ph.D., and during those years, Sylvia maintained an exhausting schedule, spending her days at the office and four nights a week in class. In 1994, she finished that degree and hardly stopped for a breath before taking on part-time work as adjunct professor. Still working full-time at BNA, she was now responsible for fine arts courses on web design and typography back at George Washington and Trinity—work she enjoyed immensely.

A few years passed, and Sylvia found herself growing restless again. Her work kept her busy, but her eyes were fixed on the horizon. In the late 1990s, the internet was creating rumblings in the publishing industry, and BNA needed some of their designers to investigate the phenomenon to learn how it worked and how to best utilize it. “I raised my hand and volunteered to figure it out,” she remembers. “That was my first exposure to the internet, and I realized it was going to be pretty big.

I saw it as a big opportunity.”

It was 1998 when she decided to leave BNA and try working for a consulting firm, and shortly after that, she moved on to a dotcom startup, relishing the opportunity to be a part of something truly new and cutting edge. “That was the start of a new chapter in my career,” she explains. “It was my first exercise in building something from the ground up, coming in to hire people, get something running, and deploy it. That feeling you get when you’re trying to figure out a puzzle—I found that intoxicating. It was really the moment when all of the sudden, the writing, the visuals, the figuring-it-out, and the ‘going somewhere you’ve never been before’ all came together.” For the first time, Sylvia felt a sense of free reign for her ambitions, and she loved it.

Sylvia was happy bouncing around between fresh new dotcoms, but when the bubble burst, it was time to pursue her success elsewhere. She took a 114

job as the Director of Marketing Communications at Rubbermaid Commercial, where she worked for three and a half years. The job was stable, and a good resume-builder, but not enough to keep her challenged and engaged in the long term. “It was a different scenario,” she recalls. “It was a Fortune 500 company with different kinds of issues. To me, it wasn’t as fun, and wasn’t quite as transformative.” To keep herself challenged and growing, she earned her MBA from the University of Maryland University College during her limited free time, all the while entering new and unknown territory—becoming a step-parent.

MBA in hand, Sylvia then decided to return to the job market. She found work with an engineering firm and again fell into her pattern of coming into a new environment, building a team, devising a strategy, and implementing it, before leaving to search for something new. It was a push from her sister-in-law that finally opened Sylvia’s eyes to the sensible next step—to go into business for herself. With that, she set about finding a way to constantly take on new challenges without constantly finding new jobs, and joining Hinge offered the ideal solution.

Although the concepts of the business were familiar, Sylvia wasn’t averse to exploring a new role. “When I first approached Hinge in Reston, Virginia, one of the partners asked if I could do business development,” Sylvia remembers. “I had never tried before, but I was willing to learn.” She took on the work with gusto and hasn’t looked back.

Since 2008, Sylvia and her three partners have established divisions of labor that suit each person’s strengths. “One partner is the creative director, so he oversees the creative quality of what we’re doing,” she explains. “He’s a copywriter by training, so he excels at that. Our managing partner, on the other hand, is all about strategy and the future. He’s a researcher and psychologist by trade, so that fits perfectly with what we do. One of our other partners is very operational, so she looks after the recruiting and operations.

Then, with my background in marketing, it’s all very complimentary.”

While her partners balance her out well in the workplace, Sylvia’s husband, Norman, provides the crucial balance in her personal life that enables her to be such an effective business leader. “He’s a very calming person,” she says of Norman, a sales executive. “I’m always running a thousand miles a minute, and he’s very supportive.” Their marriage, however, has carried its own set of challenges, and has required its own share of naïve confidence. When she met Norman in

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1999 at one of the startup companies she was working with, he already had two children. When they married in 2002, the kids were 11 and 8 years old respectively.

“At the time, I simply thought, how hard can it be—I’ll figure it out!” she remembers with a smile. Although she certainly wasn’t prepared for the struggles that accompany parenthood, and although learning how to raise children was the hardest thing she’s ever done, she took on her role with a bright-eyed enthusiasm that helped steer the family through the years.

Like Sylvia herself, Hinge prides itself on reaching further and going beyond. Along with excelling in their field, the four partners have published two books. The first, Spiraling Up, was published in 2008, and explored success among professional services firms. “The entire team was involved in that project,” Sylvia affirms. “One of us wrote it, another edited, and I did the marketing.

We interviewed 300 professional services executives, and the final partner did the interviews.” The second book, Online Marketing for Professional Services, was published in the summer of 2012. Again, the Hinge team performed qualitative and quantitative research to discern what ideas and strategies were getting results, and then compiled and published the information, setting them apart as true experts in the industry.

Along with their publications, Hinge has done its share of pro bono work. “We offer in-kind services to groups that have some connection to education,” says Sylvia, hearkening back to the values her parents instilled when she was young. “We do some work for local schools, and we built a website for the Yale Climate School. I think it’s important to find what makes sense in light of your brand, and for us, that’s education.

It’s nice to donate money to a cause, but to me, it’s far more meaningful when you support something that’s connected to what you do. To us, learning is the key to taking on, understanding, and solving any problem that arises, and it’s important to us to be a part of that.”

To young people entering the working world today, Sylvia encourages ambition, but also balance. “Don’t be afraid of working hard,” she emphasizes. “I think young people now have the benefit of using technology to help them both work hard and play hard. I really do think that, in life, you can do both.” She also warns against an entitlement mentality. “Don’t feel like you can walk in at the level your parents are,” she continues.

“You have to pay your dues! Contribute. Be engaged. It will take you further.”

Beyond that, Sylvia’s journey demonstrates a willingness to delve deep and fly high, no matter what the task at hand was at any given moment. “The attitude that you can tackle anything that comes your way requires a certain level of naiveté, and I think that’s what success is made of,” she details. “It’s the naiveté of believing you can figure it out, whatever ‘it’ is. When it comes to hard work and learning, you just figure it out. Fear can be natural and healthy, but never let it paralyze you. I don’t know any other way than to just move through things.” Indeed, since age nine, Sylvia has taken the steeper, more challenging route—and loved it. From building a new program of study at Trinity, to working full-time while pursuing a fouryear master’s, to rushing headlong into the dot com boom, to taking on the role of step-parent, to taking on the role of executive, being willing to tackle anything gives one the opportunity to triumph in anything.

Sylvia S. Montgomery

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Michael Mosel A Series of Awakenings When Mike Mosel, President of Optima Network Services, Inc., considers the fundamentals that make his business successful, he hears echoes of his father.

In the retail world of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, before Wal-Mart and Target trampled the competition, Mike’s dad was a top-notch fixer for regional players Jamesway and Ames, rescuing struggling stores and opening others. This meant frequent moves for Mike’s family, with new schools and new friends, but it also exposed Mike to his father’s work—and remarkable talent—in the business world. His greatest skill, one that still echoes today through the management style Mike himself has crafted, was simplification.

“My father had a way of simplifying what makes a business successful,” Mike says. “He would distill a business model down to its fundamentals to see if they made sense. It’s pretty easy to watch the dollars in and dollars out, in terms of basic mechanics. At Optima today, I do the same thing. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutia. But my talent, like his, has always been seeing the bigger picture, and analyzing how the pieces fit together, both immediately and down the road. Sometimes that can be as simple as comparing our revenues to our costs, and sometimes it can be more than that.”

Growing up and seeing his father open new stores and turn around failing businesses, one after another, gave young Mike a macro-perspective on business.

Witnessing a series of cross-sections that revealed individual stores at varying points in their lifecycles, including both successes and failures, contributed to Mike’s ability to see the big picture. These experiences together constituted an awakening—one of many— that would stick with him for life: the realization that the business world was his dream.

“When I was 11 or 12 years old,” Mike remembers, “I would go and work in my dad’s store. He would put me in the toy department or the sporting goods department and tell me to fix things up and get them in order. At that time I thought I wanted to be in retail business like him, and that idea later evolved into a

larger dream of the business world.”

Eleven years old is an early age to develop a yearning for a future career in business, but by that age, Mike had developed a wisdom beyond his years. Two years earlier, his younger brother passed away after fighting a terminal illness, causing Mike to experience an entirely different kind of awakening.

“I had to mature fast to help care for my brother and even my parents,” he recalls. “I learned a lot about the dynamics within families. I learned a lot about doctors and health care, and it gave me a window to the way curve balls can come in life. I was only nine at the time, but I can see now the ways that I lived roles of support for my mom and dad. Because of my dad’s work schedule, I had to be there for my mom. And when she had another child, he was my brother, but I still felt a somewhat fatherly responsibility toward him.”

While moving around so much and seeing his father’s work instilled in Mike an appreciation for business fundamentals, rising to the unique challenges he faced after his brother’s death helped develop his other key ability: perceiving the complex dynamics of relationships among people and truly connecting with them. “Leadership demands empathy, and it requires an ability to really connect to people,” he remarks. “It’s natural for me to understand these relationships, and that makes me a better leader.”

The furnace of these trying times forged in Mike a great resourcefulness as well, which was strongly influenced by his mother’s industrial resilience. “She was a stay-at-home mom when I was younger, and she really taught me to make things work,” he remembers.

“She taught me to be able to ask for help when help was truly needed, and to not be shy about it. She, too, taught me to see the whole playing field.”

The earliest awakening for Mike, however, would not be larger than life, like a dream to succeed in business, or as morally serious as truly connecting to another human being. It would come in the form of something far more mundane, and yet it would help drive the plot Michael Mosel

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of Mike’s life nearly all the way to his entrepreneurial leap. It would be a game called golf. “I grew up playing golf with my father, starting at six years old,” he explains. “It was a way to connect with my father in a singular way. Growing up, I appreciated that he would bring me along to play, even though I was so young.

This was my first real taste of adults, and of the value in connecting with people in business.”

Coupled with Mike’s first dream of business, in fact, was golf. From the beginning, Mike was a talented golfer, but while he played on his high school team and thought he could have competed at a higher level with the proper commitment and resources, the real draw for him was the business side. And later in college, when Mike encountered academic difficulty his junior year at George Mason University and had to take a semester off, the business of golf was there for him. “When I had the pleasure of a dean’s vacation in 1993, the spring of my junior year,” Mike explains, “I was either fortunate, or unfortunate, to work at the golf operations of Lansdowne, in Leesburg, Virginia.”

Mike worked at Lansdowne that spring, and then through the rest of his college career after returning to George Mason and graduating. His first job out of college, too, was as a golf pro. Golf was there for Mike, and Mike was passionate about the art and science of the game. It was a thread that had run through his whole life up to that point. It was a window into his father’s business relationships, and beyond that, a window into business itself. But Mike soon realized that he still had an important lesson to learn from golf: that, ultimately, it wasn’t going to be the thing that got him where he needed to be. Rather, he himself would be that thing.

“I had invested so much of myself into training to be a golf pro, and in working my way up from $7.50 an hour to $9.50 an hour, I felt like I was getting somewhere,” Mike explains. “But the reality is, I wasn’t. It took several frustrating experiences and a few revelations of my expected earning potential, but I eventually awakened to the fact that this path was never going to align with what I wanted to do in life.”

With that, Mike was done with pursuing his life as a golf pro. But in looking for his next step, he saw that golf had one more gift to give him. A guest of a member at one of the golf clubs Mike had worked at was the VP of sales at an internet startup. It was the late 1990s by then, and dot-coms were exploding, full steam ahead. “I knew I had the right skills for it,” Mike says. “I could talk to people, connect with them, and sell. I interviewed, and I was in.” In his first year, Mike 118

made his first $100,000. “This was amazing to me,” he affirms.

But it wasn’t enough. After transitioning through a few more positions in the industry, Mike was ready to move on to something not only bigger, but greater. “It was 2002,” he recalls. “I wasn’t married yet. In fact, I had just started dating my wife. And it was at that point that I thought, I gotta take a chance. What fruit will this tree bear?”

From his time in the dot-com world, experiencing both the boom and bust, Mike was equipped with more than a little wisdom regarding the promise of the Internet. There was great potential, but also great risk.

Still, he could see that wireless and mobile technology would be a major driver in the coming years, and would quite possibly shape the decades ahead. Mike saw his opportunity there, and he had his greatest asset at the ready: fundamentals.

“I had seen it at the internet startup companies where I was selling,” Mike recalls. “It all came back to the fundamental question: how does this company make money? I had seen a single startup practically light $30 million in venture capital on fire in just sixteen months.

I look back and think, wow, all that cash spent on dotcom related companies that really had no business plan at all. How were they going to make that money count?

The fundamentals of business went awry.”

With the fundamentals of success at the forefront of his mind, Mike and his two equal-share partners founded Optima Network Services in 2004. “If you’re young and you have any thoughts of starting a business, then don’t wait,” he says, reflecting back on that experience. “If you’re going to start a business, go at it 100 percent. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as owning your own business on the side. When I hear people say, “Oh, I do real estate on the side,’ that says to me that they still need to take that final leap that’s really going to make or break it.”

Thankfully, Mike’s leap made it. He and his partners built a company that would capitalize on the information technology boom, but without dealing in information, per se. Rather, Optima’s products and services transmit information through infrastructure development that keeps it material and concrete.

“Optima is a wireless infrastructure company that is self-performing,” Mike says. “We build the wireless infrastructure for cell carriers, wireless network operators, and state and local governments. We are in the construction business in a way, building cell towers, and really any component of a network. For Verizon, AT&T, and the like, we put people in the

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

field to build the towers and install components, and our project managers, coordinators, and technicians handle the rest.”

In a business like Mike’s, his mastery of the fundamentals was destined to shine. And after seven years of growth and success, when Optima was acquired in 2011 by MasTec, an infrastructure construction conglomerate, Mike’s big picture intuitions helped spur a greater strategic vision for Optima and other MasTec properties.

Through these successes, Mike is still learning about himself as a leader. His most recent awakening also serves as a message that he would pass along to any young person entering the business world today.

“Through an experience at a personal development workshop, I learned that although I was leading, I always had a kind of governor on,” he concedes. “I was playing it safe. I would push to the very edge of safety and succeed, but I would never put myself in a situation where I could try my hardest and possibly

fail. This lesson changed not only the way I lead in business, but the way I connect with my wife and the way I’m a father to my kids.”

Perhaps the most inspiring theme that permeates Mike’s success is the fact that the awakenings upon which it’s built are self-perpetuating. One awakening inevitably paves the way for another, creating a lifetime of transformation that keeps him continually evolving into a better leader, a better business figure, a better family man, and a better person. “I have a sticker on my computer monitor with the words, What are you going to create?” he says. “So many people these days are asking, what are people going to give me, or what am I entitled to? Instead, they should be concentrating on what they’re going to create, and what kind of real value they can bring to the world, and they should be fearless about chasing that. They should be fearless about making mistakes. I learned to overcome my fear of making mistakes, and it’s opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.”

Michael Mosel

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Charles Nahabedian Solving Any Problem If there is one thing that Charlie Nahabedian refuses to leave the house without, it’s his jackknife. “I have all different kinds,” he says. “I still have my first pocketknife from the Boy Scouts, and every weekend I pull out my Swiss Army Knife to help out with whatever project I have to do around the house. I keep them around because between my brain, my hands, and my jackknife, I can solve just about any problem.”

Charlie will readily call himself a handyman, but his ability to problem solve with just his own talents and the simplest of tools goes deeper than his hobbies, or even his prestigious education and experience as an engineer. His father immigrated to America from Armenia in 1921 with nothing but integrity and work ethic to his name, but somehow, he was able to use his God-given talents to make the most of his chance to live in the land of opportunity. “He was able to learn the language, open his own business, and raise a family of eight children with only a sixth grade education,” Charlie says. “I realized early on that, if he could do that, and if I have access to a better education, hopefully I can do even better for my family and my community.”

Just as he hoped to, Charlie learned all he could and solved as many problems as he could along the way.

Today, he is the President, CEO, and cofounder of VideoKall, Inc., a company on the verge of introducing a video telecommunication system that will revolutionize healthcare in America.

By the time Charlie began formulating the idea of VideoKall, he had forty-five years of experience in the telecom business under his belt, with expertise across a variety of specialties including technology development, technology and product implementation, service implementation, marketing, and, most importantly, team building. “I got to a point where one of my professional friends and I were trying to do what we call a leverage buyout of several like-companies in order to pool the resources and assets, build a stronger company, and sell it off for a profit,” he explains. “One of the companies we approached was being run by Vince

Waterson, who later became one of my co-founders at VideoKall. It turned out the deal we were working on with his company didn’t go through, but Vince, who is a very creative individual with a strong telecom background, approached me about some technology he had developed.”

The technology to which Vince was referring made it possible to hold video phone calls around the world, and he hoped to collaborate with Charlie to build a company around the idea. While the technology allowed for international friends and family members to see each other at a low price for their conversation, Charlie advised that they fine-tune the idea in order to have a more compelling reason for people to use the product. Shortly after, they developed an application for the technology in international remittances, so that money could be sent internationally faster, at less cost, and with direct access to the recipient through faceto-face communication. The idea was so compelling that a demonstration of the application won an international award in London.

The company was thus set in motion in 2006, yet because of the fluctuations in the economy, the team struggled to find a good partner that was licensed and strong in international remittances, which prompted them to redirect the application of the technology toward health care. That idea was spurred when Charlie was describing their technology to the executive of a visiting nurse association. “She told me they have similar technologies in their association, where the nurses use telephone lines to monitor blood pressure, pulse, and the like,” he explains. “We realized that we could expand on that notion, so we developed the MEDEX Spot Unmanned Micro Clinic self-service primary healthcare concept with medical and legal advice, and now we can provide outpatient services at better prices to the user than a manned clinic like CVS --- to the benefit of patients and their service providers. There might be a few things we can’t do, like put a bandage on, but we can provide better service. We can speak their Charles Nahabedian

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language. They can choose the gender of the Nurse Practitioner, all at a good price. With the high cost of health care, an increasing component of these costs is outpatient visits and non-critical emergency room visits. The majority of these situations can be handled very easily and inexpensively in more convenient locations. If you can bring quality services, convenience, and low cost to the user, you have a good recipe for a winning operation, especially because we’re likely to see more limited access to primary care physicians.” Take, for instance, the example of a patient with a fever.

They can go to their local drug store and purchase a prepaid service SMARTcard, which doubly acts as a key to micro clinic “cabin” where the call takes place. The patients populate the SMARTcard with their medical history, which is uploaded via a communications link to a Nurse Practitioner at a hospital Medical Call Center that may be miles away. From there, with the vital signs measurements and a quality video phone call, the Nurse Practitioner can send electronically a prescription to the pharmacy nearest to the patient, or transfer the patient to an on-call doctor. “While it may not be as personal as the beloved family doctor, it cuts out scheduling an appointment and long waits in a waiting room full of sick people,” Charlie confirms.

With the project nearing completion, VideoKall is 30 percent into its Angel investment round, after which it will be four months away from having a market unit ready to be presented to the public. The company plans on having a nationwide road tour with a MEDEX Spot Cabin installed in a large trailer, which will have a small satellite antenna on the roof. At every city and wayside stop around the country, the cabin will be connected to the hospital by satellite, and visitors to the mobile clinic will have remote medical assessments. Additionally, prospective customers such as Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS will have the opportunity to commit to deployment for their early competitive advantage. “While the cabins may have to compete with more traditional clinics, Medex Spot service has an advantage in that they need only five customers per day to be financially sustainable – about half the traffic of a manned clinic,” Charlie points out.

Poised at the brink of this remarkable accomplishment, Charlie sees his own contributions as the result of the entrepreneurial seed that was planted in him by his father early in life. Mr. Nahabedian opened his own dry cleaning and tailoring business shortly after moving to the U.S., which quickly gained momentum. After saving enough money, he brought his wife, to whom he had been betrothed earlier, to join him in America.

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His father’s business did so well that at one point, he had four locations around the Manhattan area. In the mid-1930’s, he decided to move the family to Boston, where Charlie was born. He concentrated his business into a single, larger store in the Boston area, where Charlie and his siblings were expected to help out. The children walked or rode their bikes to the shop after school every day. “I never resented having to do it,” Charlie remembers now. “It was just being part of the family. My dad was clever though, because he had a few tricks along the way to keep us motivated. For example, we were tasked with making sure there was nothing in the pockets of clothing before they were dry-cleaned, so he would put coins in the clothes to give us extra incentive to keep looking.”

Looking back, Charlie credits working at the shop for developing his customer service skills. “As a serviceoriented business, you have to understand that people have unique preferences and different standards,” he says. “To satisfy a customer, you have to understand their requirements and know how to fulfill them.” When Charlie was not helping out at the shop, he earned extra spending money through various childhood jobs that included a paper route. Utilizing his people skills, he also worked as a golf caddie, and when he was old enough, he drove an ice cream truck in neighborhoods around Boston.

Charlie was always a bright child, but since he usually worked in the family shop after school, he rarely had enough time to do his homework. “It was very typical for my report card to have all A’s, but with comments that said I wasn’t working hard enough,” he laughs. “I did well on the tests, but I only occasionally did my homework. Eventually, my teachers had to start talking to my dad to convince him that I needed to back off at the shop and focus on my studies so that I could get a scholarship to college.”

Fortunately, his father was supportive, and Charlie was accepted to Northeastern University, where he pursued electrical engineering. To pay for school, he participated in a co-op program, where he would alternate semesters between studying and working at Raytheon Company, a technology leader in electronics and defense. While it took a year longer to finish his Bachelor’s degree, he excelled in his program since he had unlimited time to study—so much so that his professors encouraged him to pursue a PhD immediately after graduation. Unfortunately, however, the Vietnam War was well underway, and he would only be able to receive a student deferment for his Masters. Luckily, earning that next degree came at no additional cost, as

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

he landed a graduate assistantship at Northeastern that provided free tuition and paid him to teach, as well as a resident assistantship for free room and board.

During his time at Northeastern, Charlie was enrolled in the ROTC, so that by the time he graduated, he was a Cadet Brigadier General, the highest student rank.

After graduating, he joined the Army, where he went in as a Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps. After going through the Signal Corps Officer’s Basic Training, he was sent to Vietnam, where he was the Maintenance and Supply Officer for the multi-site Troposphericscatter Communications Company, which bounced high-powered microwave signals off the troposphere to extend radio ranges from thirty to three hundred miles.

For his final eight months of service, he was assigned to the Electronic Warfare Lab in New Jersey. His projects were Airborne Radio Direction Findings Systems, so that as pilots flew their aircraft around Vietnam, they would directionally detect enemy radios where they could be triangulated, targeted, and destroyed. “During my master’s program, I had done significant work with the propagation of radio waves within the wave field, so I understood how waves differed in properties away from and around an antenna,” he explains. While working on his project, he analyzed the data from his test flights and found several anomalies, which he further analyzed with a mathematician. From this work, rather than having a large probable location for a target, he could narrow the angle significantly, which reduced the size of that probable target by an order of magnitude. His breakthrough was a huge contribution to the war effort, so he went to his boss asking to file for a patent. “My boss laughed at me, saying it was classified information, so I couldn’t file a patent,” Charlie recalls.

“I was glad I made the contribution, but it helped me realize that I didn’t want to spend my career there.”

Charlie spent a total of two years with the Army—a time that he looks back on as having taught him invaluable lessons in leadership. “I’m a walk-around manager,” he says. “I don’t lead from a distance. I always have an open door and encourage communication directly between me and anyone else in my company because I prefer unfiltered information. Inevitably, things are lost or misinterpreted as they are passed from person to person, but I try to minimize that through my leadership approach.”

After leaving the Army, Charlie landed a job with Bell Labs in its mobile telephone department. At the time he was hired, mobile telephones were a large unit found in cars that required an even-larger unit in the trunk, with a cumbersome antenna. Charlie’s first project at Bell

Labs was to complete the prototype of a portable phone and convince the FCC that the radio waves surrounding us could be used for low-power applications. Charlie finished his fieldwork in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1982 that the first cordless phone came out, as the FCC had needed considerable time to plan and re-farm the spectrum. Shortly after field and customer testing of the portable phone, Charlie supervised the development and completion of a coin-telephone system onboard the Metroliner trains running between New York and Washington, D.C. “My group designed the system, did all the development, worked with the telephone companies, and had the entire radio, switching and transmission systems installed and operating within 18 months of the project’s request,” he says. “After that, my next team developed the first business communications system using a microprocessor controller to process calls in and out of an office complex. We took that system from concept to manufacture, so I was promoted and went to work at AT&T.” Charlie’s work at Bell Labs was so invaluable that the company paid for him to attain his MBA. It was unusual for a Development Supervisor to earn such a degree, but by that point, Charlie had begun planning the next transition in his career path. “I had a lot of fun with the technology at Bell Labs, but I also had to do the menial stuff,” he recalls. “I wanted the bigger picture, and I wanted to be managing more of it, so I knew I needed to complement my education.”

At AT&T, Charlie was initially promoted to a manager position, where he considered telecom products and approved them for availability and support from telephone companies. In that capacity, he was quickly brought into a project between AT&T and Walt Disney World to create the World Key Information Network.

“Basically, the concept was that there would be kiosks around EPCOT Park that guests could use without any training,” he explains. “They could find answers to questions, pull up schedules, locate restaurants and other attractions, preview pavilions, and make restaurant reservations.” Originally, the contract stated that Disney would design and develop the project with AT&T sponsoring it, but eighteen months before their scheduled debut, Disney returned to AT&T asking for help. “AT&T asked me to go down and talk to Disney about what they wanted, so the first thing I did was sit down with them and rewrite the contract so that the money would stay the same, but the work and patents would go to AT&T instead, as we were taking over development.”

After getting a clear definition of what Disney was Charles Nahabedian

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wanting, Charlie visited thirteen different departments in Bell Labs to find the perfect combination of architecture and technologies for the project. Because the project required the collaboration of workers across the gamut of Bell Labs’ expertise, he initially struggled to receive approval, but eventually, Bell Labs President, Ian Ross, his former executive director, gave the goahead. “I wanted to bring everyone together in one department so that we would have all the expertise and knowledge accessible to get the job done efficiently,” Charlie recalls. “So I took over as Program Director, and we managed to have the system and service ready on time for opening day. It was a great success story of bringing people together, convincing them that there is a need and a way to get it done, but that everything had to be done just right.” Just as he had done so many times throughout his career, Charlie proved again—this time amidst extremely high stakes—that he could solve any problem.

After a combined total of twenty years at Bell Labs and AT&T, Charlie decided to look into new career opportunities. At the time of his departure, he had already been promoted to Director, but he felt it was time to leave when the company continued to downsize. He moved to a new company that had just signed a contract with LG of Korea to build a portable cellular phone. The project began with only Charlie and his secretary, but within two years, the company had grown to twenty employees, and they had developed a working model ready for manufacture. The effort marked not only a giant success, but also Charlie’s first entrepreneurial effort.

Looking to broaden his experience platform, he sold the company to Lucky Goldstar of Korea in 1989 and then went on to work in the venture capital business with Fidelity Investments to develop a telecom project. Two years later, he moved on to a consulting job in Chicago, but shortly after joining, he was offered the position of Vice President of Corporate Development for a company in New Jersey deploying a radio-based data network for fleet services. Accepting but determining the job wasn’t a good fit, he voluntarily left to work as the Head of Commercial Operations for a business in Long Island, where they made intelligent antennas for the cellular industry. Determining the parent company wasn’t really committed, he joined a boutique telecom management consulting firm.

He eventually became Vice President and Partner, but after five years of management consulting, the terrorist attacks of September 11th occurred, putting many companies out of business or on hold. Charlie 124

left the company and decided to do consulting on his own while also teaching classes on entrepreneurship to undergraduate, MBA, and Executive MBA students at Farleigh Dickenson University, which he did for eight years. The advice he gave to his students translates to any young person entering the working world today. “Know yourself,” he urges. “In the MBA program, we didn’t just teach students how to run a business; we taught them how to get to know themselves. If you know what you’re good at, and in what role, and how you can best contribute to the business, then you prepare yourself to be successful and progress within that area. I would ask, what makes you unique? How can you apply that to your interests and to what you’ve learned? How can you complement your skills and build an effective team? If you can bring harmony among those things, you will find success.”

Undoubtedly, the advice Charlie offers to young people is a lesson learned from his parents’ success story as immigrants. “My parents came to this country of opportunity and made the best of it,” he says. “They passed that along by encouraging their children to always try to do better than they did, which gave me the incentive and focus to understand myself and what I can do. When I tackle an issue today, I learn all the skills and perspectives I need in order to understand the problem, so that I’ll know how to analyze it, communicate effectively, and find the solution. I approach everything as comprehensively as I can.”

Today, Charlie foresees a bright future for VideoKall, not only because of his own ability to recognize his strengths and those of others, but because of the positive feedback the project has already received. “We’ve already won an international award and demonstrated what we can do for the healthcare industry, so now it’s time to raise money and really move this service offering along,” he says. “It’s time to solve the real problems facing societies at home and abroad.”

With this constructive orientation around solving problems, Charlie’s impact will certainly leave the world a better place than it was when he first came into it. Whether he’s fixing things around the house with his jackknife, lending his time and efforts as a volunteer at his church and in his community, supporting his talented and professional wife to raise their two successful daughters with grace, or wielding his experience and vision to lead VideoKall to success, Charlie’s example shows the true success that comes from using one’s abilities, whether God-given or manmade, to be the best you can be, and to positively influence others along the way.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Keith Scandone The Producer Through the years, Keith Scandone has been an actor, playwright, entertainment reporter, and personal chef. He’s been a casting assistant, a script doctor, and a critic for a music magazine. Keith has been a waiter, an assistant tennis pro, a marketing director, and a dog walker. Yet of all of his odd jobs, the one that prepared him most for his daily duties as the CEO of O3 World, was as the producer of a little play in Los Angeles.

Keith is currently a cofounder and CEO of O3 World, an interactive agency that combines business intelligence, informed design, and integrated technology to produce web based strategies and solutions for their clients. Established in 2005, O3 works with a wide array of clients including Comcast, Thomson Reuters, and Five Below. While his current position and success seems orthodox, it’s his path to get there, which included his producing stint, that has proven to be anything but.

The beginnings of this unconventional path can be traced back to his days at Loyola College in Maryland. While he majored in Political Science, it was his minor in Fine Arts that had the most influence on Keith’s life and post college career. During his junior year, exhibiting an all or nothing attitude that would become his trademark, he decided that his first crack at acting would be to audition for the lead role in Oedipus Rex. Surprising the director and even himself, he performed so well that he landed the role, and from that day forward, he threw himself into what became a 6-year pursuit of an acting career. “I think it was the first time I really, truly gave 100 percent of my energy to something,” he recalls. “It was a life-changing experience.”

Keith’s passion for acting took him to Los Angeles, where he pursued a name for himself in an oversaturated and fiercely competitive city and industry. While he loved acting and the city itself, he discovered after six years that he was no closer to getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard than the day he arrived, and that it was time for a change in career and focus. This necessity became even clearer after performing in a play he wrote, which ended up being chosen as part of a playwriting series

that a local theater group was producing. While Keith played the lead role, he also played a significant role in the behind-the-scenes production of the play, mainly because of a lack of resources within the small group. “I ended up having to bring actors in for auditions, choose a director, choose the actors, put the set design together, get the furniture, promote it, and make sure tickets were being sold,” he remembers today. “That’s when I realized that, while acting was great, producing is what I really loved and what I was much better at, because producing allowed me to bring all of the pieces together.”

That philosophy and scope of responsibilities are no different than Keith’s responsibilities and duties today. Keith’s role in O3 has focused on creating, or producing, new business for the company, and working collaboratively with his business partner, or creative director, on strategic growth for the company. “Just like being the producer of a movie or a play, at a company, you’re involved in nearly every aspect of its growth,” he explains. “I’ve had a hand in creating our company’s name, positioning it, establishing its culture, and playing a key role in most of its hires. I like overseeing and orchestrating, instead of being in the trenches and the weeds doing one thing. I get bored when my focus is too narrow, as I like touching a little bit of everything.

For me, this company is like producing one big play—it just happens to be in several acts that keep unfolding year after year.”

O3 World’s inception came a little more than a year after Keith’s move from Los Angeles. He returned to his home state of Pennsylvania, with no real game plan beyond making a change in careers. He had a sense that he wanted to work in advertising, since he still wanted to stay in a creative field, but with no real relevant experience, many strongly recommended he reconsider his career path.

But much like his all-or-nothing approach to acting, he applied that same philosophy to advertising, and before long, Keith fell into an opportunity that would be his first entry into advertising and the interactive Keith Scandone

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space: working for an online entertainment city guide.

“I ended up having the opportunity to rebrand their company in the marketplace,” he recalls. “I worked with designers to redo their website, hired writers to reshape their editorial staff, and worked with the city’s top PR firms to help gain exposure and traffic to the site by fostering strong relationships. It was all a first for me, and a kind of learn-as-I-go opportunity, but I think all of my odd jobs in Los Angeles collectively prepared me for the varied duties associated with that role.”

In addition to the city guide, the firm offered web design and development services to many clients as well, which enabled Keith to see how selling and production process worked. While his input was respected, however, being a mere employee kept him from having the impact on the strategic growth of the company he wanted to have. “They were working with a lot of hair salons, bars, restaurants, and other businesses with limited budgets, and they were doing smaller, designoriented sites,” Keith remarks. “I wanted to go after bigger projects and enterprise solutions, really being able to immerse myself in the companies’ culture and future business needs, and becoming more of a strategic partner with them.”

While owning a business was still far from Keith’s mind during his years in Los Angeles, his entrepreneurial spirit sprung long before that time in his life, inspired in part by his father. An attorney in Philadelphia, he was a sole practitioner with a reputation for scrupulous honesty. “My father was a very honest and very ethical attorney, and from a business standpoint, I got a lot of my core values from him,” Keith notes. “He was honest almost to a fault and did a lot of pro bono work for people. From him, I learned to be very fair in all my dealings with people.” The middle of three children, with an older brother and younger sister, he credits both his parents with incredible support over the years.

Although his father speculated that he would’ve been a great lawyer because of his ability to see both sides of an issue—an ability that serves him well today at O3 World—his mother and father encouraged their son to follow his own path, and continued to support him at every step along the way.

Today, giving 100 percent in pursuit of his goals has become the norm for Keith—a necessary attribute for successful entrepreneurs, and the saving grace that allowed O3 to get off the ground at its outset. “One of the hardest things I’ve done is try to make a name for ourselves in an overly saturated marketplace, filled with salespeople that consistently over-promise and underdeliver,” Keith describes. “Philadelphia is a very old126

school, traditional town, and it was much slower on the interactive side of things when it came to enterprise level websites than other cities tend to be. Because of that, a lot of clients were much slower to go with a company like us. Also, being a small company with only a year or two under our belts, we were much more of a risk.

People wanted a guarantee that we weren’t going to go out of business before trusting us with their business, which is kind of a catch-22. They felt much safer hiring the company that’s been around 35 years versus the company that’s been around only three years.”

Along with overcoming long odds, Keith is proud of the culture at O3 World, which he describes as a family.

“We don’t outsource any of our work,” he avows. “It is very common for other agencies to outsource, either to other individuals or overseas, but it’s always been very important to us that everybody who contributes to the end product is truly aligned with our vision and commitment to quality. We all come in and work side by side every single day, and working so collectively and collaboratively on a day-to-day basis is something that’s very unique in the industry we work in.”

Although employees are expected to be in the office every day, Keith has focused on developing an atmosphere of genuine respect between clients and employees such that the value of their time is truly recognized. “While we work very hard for our clients, which often includes overtime, it’s important that our clients respect our process and the people producing the work,” he affirms.

To young people entering the working world today, Keith emphasizes the importance of follow-through above all else. “Do what you say you’re going to do,” he stresses. “It’s a simple motto, but I just don’t see it all that often. Kids complain that it’s hard to find a job, but it’s not as hard if you really showcase that you’re passionate.

If you really care about something, pay attention to detail, work harder, and just follow through, success will come to you.”

Keith also emphasizes the need to make a change if a change is needed, just as he did when he submitted his play in that contest all those years ago and suddenly saw himself in a new light. “Finding who I was and what I could be was never based on a formula,” he points out. “My path was all over the place, but it worked. I would tell people not to be so hung up on choosing the wrong major or taking a job in an industry that isn’t going down the right path for you. Have the confidence and courage to know that if you’re really passionate about going into a new industry or starting your own business, you can succeed. While experience plays a

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role in hiring technical positions, the most important qualifications, for me anyway, are nothing more than dedication, interest, and intelligence.”

Giving back to the community is also an important value Keith encourages young people to embrace, and one he exemplifies through pro bono work at O3 World. Usually affiliated with several non-profits at a time, O3 currently works with Back on my Feet and with the Travis Manion Foundation—two national organizations that are very important to Keith, his business partner, and O3 at large.

Keith’s career certainly took many turns since he studied fine arts and drama at Loyola, but his

commitment to following his dreams never wavered.

Everything he pursued, he did so whole-heartedly, and this, more than anything else, brought him success.

“The opportunity is always there,” he reminds us. “Even if there’s no job posting on a company’s website, it’s there. If you’re talented enough, if you want it enough, and if you’re passionate enough, there’s a job waiting for you.” By taking responsibility for the production value of our own lives, choosing the vision and story we want to make ourselves into, and then carrying them out with discipline, dedication, and our own unique style, we have the ability to be our own producers and bring scripts—and dreams—to life.

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David Schmidt Ahead of the Game David Schmidt could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“Mr. Schmidt, we are very impressed by your work at Vanderbilt,” the campaign worker said. “We’d like to invite you to greet Mr. and Mrs. Reagan when they arrive in Nashville for Unity Day.” It seemed too good to be true. Since attending a political rally at the age of ten in 1968, David had looked to Ronald Reagan as an iconic figure. Throughout his formative years, he had followed the politician, and he even launched a group called Students for Reagan at Vanderbilt University.

Peers had ridiculed him that Reagan was washed-up, and that he was wasting his time, but David had researched enough to know that Reagan was just getting started.

He had been right, and by the time he received the invitation, Reagan was a leading public figure and just months away from taking office as President.

Needless to say, David agreed, and in 1980, he met the Reagans, shook their hands, and escorted them to Nashville’s Unity Day. “It was one of the most exciting times of my life, even to this day,” he avows.

“I remember coming back for Homecoming and some of my former classmates telling me I was a prophet for having predicted Reagan’s success as a candidate.”

Since that day, David has stayed strongly involved in politics, and has made a career out of always staying a step ahead of the game. After working for several leading food companies and serving a presidential appointment at the US Department of Agriculture for the first Bush administration, David is now the President and CEO of the International Food Information Council & Foundation (IFIC), a trade association with an associated foundation dedicated to providing science-based information on food safety and nutrition to the public. “Our job is to debunk the myths surrounding food safety through scientific facts,” David explains. “We do this through communications rather than government representation, which makes us unique. Ultimately, it’s our job to stay ahead of the game when it comes to health, nutrition, and food

safety, so that we can make sure the public comes out ahead as well.”

Founded in 1985, IFIC was initially formed in response to the controversial ingredient aspartame, which was being introduced in soft drinks at the time.

While the FDA confirmed the safety of the product, some consumers continued to hold reservations. IFIC thus began as a small group supported by the industry while still maintaining a third-party representation of the scientific facts. As they navigated the aspartame issue, the association began forming close relationships, which have remained a key aspect of IFIC’s success in the years since. “The American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation became our first partner to give their stamp of approval on our work,” David recalls. “We did the arms and legs of putting the messages together, and having that stamp of approval was very important. Knowing that, we worked extremely hard to make sure what we put out was accurate, and we have maintained that commitment to excellence ever since.

While we have been challenged because we accept funding from the food industry, we’ve never been credibly challenged on our accuracy.”

These values, which center upon hard work and integrity, have always been cornerstones of David’s foundation, even as a young child. He was born in Covington, Kentucky, as the fourth of six children.

His mother had grown up on a farm, and while she stayed at home with the family, she often assisted his father, an orthodontist, in his offices in Northern Kentucky as well as in Cincinnati, OH. Young David immersed himself in his school work, which he always excelled in, as well as in various sports, such as cross country, tennis, and golf. He raked leaves and shoveled driveways for extra cash, and his innate entrepreneurial spirit compelled him to hold small backyard carnivals that neighborhood children could pay fifty cents to attend. While he made small amounts of money, his grandfather encouraged him to always put a portion of every check he made, no matter how small, into a bank account.

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For this reason and many others, his grandfather was one of his greatest mentors. He owned a tobacco and vegetable farm five miles away from where David grew up, and David and his siblings would go the farm to fish or have family dinners. When he was sixteen, David was given a row in his grandfather’s giant garden to grow whatever he wanted, which led to David’s lifelong dedication to food and agriculture. Additionally, he learned how to be financially responsible from his grandfather, who had always been financially secure.

When his mother was not working at home or in the office, she was an avid volunteer in their Church, as well as for the Republican Party, for which she led the Northern Kentucky Republican Women’s Organization.

Her enthusiasm for politics drove her to encourage her children to get involved as well, either by assisting for campaigns or attending events. In 1964, when David was only six, his mother brought him to a campaign event in which the then-presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was speaking. He was one of the youngest attendees at the convention, and while he was perhaps still too young to understand everything Goldwater told the crowd, he can still remember the intense energy in the room and the rush of adrenaline in the presidential candidate’s voice. From then, politics became the forefront of his interests, and he kept a Goldwater campaign button close to remind him of the life-changing episode.

Since that time, David shared his mother’s deep love of politics, and after attending that first campaign rally, he became involved in any way he could. In high school, he served as President of the Student Council and played Nixon in his school’s mock election. He joined his mother in volunteering for campaigns, and in 1968, she took him to Ronald Reagan’s rally—the event that would bring his life full-circle many years later.

Despite his love for politics, David did not feel driven to pursue a political career himself. His father had encouraged him to go into dentistry, but after enrolling at Vanderbilt University, he found he was much more interested in business, prompting him to major in business administration with a concentration in marketing and English writing. He gained his first experience in sales by taking a summer job working for American General Life Insurance, which he found at once challenging and fascinating. “I never considered myself to be a natural salesperson,” he notes. “But I’ve followed many people who are, and I’ve learned that it’s really about returning phone calls and doing what you say you’re going to do.” Shortly after graduating, he 130

was offered a job with Oscar Mayer as a sales trainee, and after proving his value, was granted a permanent position in New Orleans. He stayed with the company for four years before transferring to PepsiCo for two years. He then took a job with Canada Dry, which moved him to Dallas, Texas. In all three of the companies he worked for during those eight years, he served in sales in food service, building a strong skills base that would serve him well in the years to come.

Throughout his post-graduation years, he attended every Republican Convention but one and continued to volunteer for the Reagan campaigns. “I decided pretty early I would support then Vice President George Bush due to his loyalty to Reagan,” David comments. “I met some people through a Republican Club in Dallas who had been with Bush when he ran for Senate in 1964, and I helped run the phone banks for Dallas County during the primary.” Shortly after Bush was elected in 1988, David received a phone call from White House personnel asking him to come in for an interview. He happened to be in D.C. for a company meeting, so he went in the next day and was offered a position with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. “They usually bring in people with great campaign experience but not so much experience beyond that,” he recalls. “I had a strong corporate background, which they liked.”

Within weeks of beginning his appointment, David was promoted to take over legislation and media relations for the agency. “I went from a staff of three to a staff of sixty,” he laughs. “That’s where I learned the organizational management skills and personal skills that I hadn’t developed as much as a sales person. I learned how to read the body language of a staff that large, which opened up a whole world of sensitivities I hadn’t been aware of.” One such sensitivity was the importance of recognizing and rewarding his staff for their hard work. “You can’t do enough of telling people how much you appreciate what they’re doing,” he notes.

“But it has to be sincere; you can’t just praise everyone and not truly mean it.”

David stayed on in that capacity for the full four years of Bush’s term, and then left after the president lost his reelection. During his time with the USDA, however, he had become familiar with IFIC. “I’d gotten to know the group a little through my government work and found them to be very credible,” David says.

“After we lost the election, the president was out of a job and so was I, so joining IFIC seemed like a good fit.” David was most drawn to IFIC for their exceptional professionalism in communication, as well as for their stamps of quality and credibility. “They really made

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sure the information they presented was backed up and accurate, which is a model I’m very drawn to,” he says. “It’s a matter of integrity.”

Thus, in 1993, David joined as Director of Communications of IFIC, which at the time had thirteen staff members. Since that time, the association has grown to twenty employees with a budget of $5 million, and has expanded its target issues to encompass not only ingredients, but also manufacturing and agriculture. “We receive multinational support,” David says. “This year, we had thirty-nine multinational leaders that range from Coca-Cola to Kraft, Monsanto to DuPont, and even to food service, such as McDonalds.”

Over the following thirteen years, David received various promotions, from Vice President of Food Safety, to Senior Vice President, and finally to Executive Vice President, until in 2006, after a vigorous yearlong process of interviews and competition, he was named President and CEO. While David loves working at IFIC and helping his supporters and American consumers stay ahead of the game through scientific research and advocacy, it’s too soon to tell if he will finish his career with the association or try something new before he retires.

Regardless of what he decides in the future, he is deeply committed to his role, and he’s currently working on a new business model for IFIC that sets optimal standards for accomplishment within the organization

and continues to expand the vital relationships that bring success to IFIC and its affiliates.

Though David is most proud of his wife of three years and his four children, his personal triumphs over the challenges of leadership are also among his greatest accomplishments. “I believe I have naturally gravitated to leadership roles,” he comments. “I wouldn’t say I was a born leader, but people trusted me, and I’d get named to things for that reason. I wasn’t always seeking it out, but when I saw a situation I knew I could make better, I went for it.” This character trait was certainly demonstrated in 2000, when David was recruited to run for the Town of Leesburg, VA Council, and successfully won the election. He served a four-year term and was asked to fill in for another councilmember’s unexpired term in 2008, but he has not run for office since.

In advising young people entering the working world today, he encourages them to treat trust as sacred, and to always keep in mind the power of communication.

“Communication in whatever you do is one of the most important things to master,” he notes. “This involves being able to put yourself in your audience’s shoes, whoever they may be, and understand what will resonate most with them. Knowing your audience is crucial to a successful career.” By honing communication skills, building a nuanced understanding of industry terrain, and putting yourself in the shoes of others in this manner, you’re effectively putting yourself ahead of the game—and ready for the next one.

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David Steiner The Idea Tender One might say that David Steiner is in the business of good ideas, and that he has been cultivating this business all his life. To earn money as a child, he became the go-to gardener and lawn care provider for a neighbor in town. One season, duty called and he found himself raking leaves on Christmas Eve. “My fingers were numb through and through by the time I got home, but we got the job done!” he remembers today.

“For me, the experience was like a metaphor for ideas.

Anyone can provide a service, but good ideas are rare, and to generate them, you can’t be afraid of working hard and getting dirty. They don’t come easy. It’s about working hard to get the leaves out from underneath the bushes, like I did that frozen Christmas Eve.” Once one has buckled down, raked out the hard leaves, and figured out what the idea is, the task then turns to how to best position it in the marketplace. And as David also learned as a boy, one is smart to undertake tasks sooner rather than later.

His father had a garden, and Mr. Steiner would task his three young sons with its maintenance in the summers while he was at work. He wanted the green beans hoed, the weeds pulled, and the potatoes dug by the time he came home at the end of the day. “We could do it at the beginning of the day, when the sun was still low in the sky and last night’s chill still hung in the air, or at the end of the day, when the sweltering afternoon heat had set in,” he recalls. “It was our choice.”

Now the President and Chief Business Development Officer of D&R International, Ltd, an innovative government contractor specializing in data-driven energy efficiency solutions, David knows that the company has the option of resting on the laurels of what it’s already achieved, if it wanted to. “But we don’t,” he affirms. “By the end of the day, we’ve got to get these new ideas out there circulating in the marketplace, and the only way to do that is for us to put in the elbow grease to create them in a way that appeals to people. We could wait until we’ve got the perfect package in place, but instead, we’re taking the entrepreneurial route. We’re

actually trying new things, not just thinking about trying them. We’re not waiting around for our clients and potential buyers to come to us. We’re going to them and showing them what we’ve got.”

As the son of two pastors, David’s childhood also taught him what to do next. “At this point, you’re going to have to say something new,” he affirms. “If your idea didn’t work, you’ll start the process over again. If it did work, you’ll keep telling it in a different way. My parents had to put new sermons together every Sunday. For ten minutes each week, they had to speak about something that was compelling enough that people would remember it and go out and want to change their lives.

To tell the same sermon each week would be fruitless. People would stop coming.

You ultimately have to come up with a different message, and a different way of telling the story. It’s the same way with business. We can tell the story over and over the way we think it needs to be told because we think it’s right, but we have to understand where each listener is coming from. We have to tailor it to the goals and objectives of who we’re working with and what level they’re on in terms of their needs to engage with us.”

D&R International was launched in 1985, but David did not come to know of the company until 2000, when he was working at the Maytag Corporation. “I became familiar with the team and was quite impressed by the detail of information and the quality of work they put out,” David explains. When Whirlpool bought out Maytag, David was invited to be a part of D&R. David had not thought much about owning a company, but the more he learned about it, the more it appealed to him.

Joining D&R was, in some sense, a test. With his extensive experience in government affairs and various other aspects of business, David had become adept at bringing experts together, making sure everyone had a seat at the table to enrich the discussion and unearth the best solutions. But did he have the fortitude to run a company? “The concept of running a company sounds great,” David acknowledges today. “It has a mystique.

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But when you actually get into it, you find out how hard it is. Some people don’t want it.” David accepted the challenge, committed to cultivating the collaborative culture, and embraced the power of creating ideas.

David now has a majority stake in D&R, along with six other partial owners who purchased the company in 2010. “We’re all partners to help drive the future of the company, keeping our focus on innovative solutions for energy efficiency in the marketplace,” he affirms. “We could all go on and be very prosperous in other firms, but we believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. We’re trying to promote a different type of market solution and a different way of analyzing the data and the marketplace. We don’t want to be confined by the preestablished ways of doing things; we want to open up and take a broader view.”

Today, D&R utilizes its extensive expertise in energy efficiency and applies it to the core fundamentals of data, helping its clients identify the realities hidden in the numbers and then developing the best solutions for these realities. It has traditionally contracted with agencies like the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, yet with recent changes in the government contracting and spending terrain, they’ve begun to look at competitive markets in the private sector as well. “We can offer data insights, solutions, and marketing and merchandising opportunities to help our clients better introduce energy efficiency technologies and better appeal to consumers and businesses to adopt them,” David explains. “It’s an interesting path to take because we’re doing it differently than most other contracting and consulting firms in the marketplace today.”

This path and approach led D&R to launch a new service called BETTER DATA BETTER DESIGN®, focused on bringing collaboration into the energy efficiency space to identify where they can get good energy savings to meet their regulatory or legislative mandates. Through this initiative, David and his team are delivering services to their customers to help them save energy. “It’s a huge gamble on our part,” he points out. “We’ve become very entrepreneurial with it in trying to sell the service to the marketplace, and it’s transforming the way our clients think of us. It’s a challenge to push paradigm shifts with this endeavor, but it’s a positive way we can be a market disruptor, and we believe the energy efficiency marketplace is now going through a period of searching for the next best innovations to help drive further energy efficiency savings in the market. There’s a lot to be done in energy 134

efficiency that hasn’t been accomplished yet, and we’re committed to pursuing that.”

Today, D&R employs a team of around 45 people. It is no traditional consulting firm; rather, it also provides products developed through its unique mastery of certain segments of the energy efficiency market. It is currently launching various market profile reports for utilities, retailers, manufacturers, and investors that afford glimpses into what the market’s really doing.

“It’s an alternate revenue stream that helps broaden our base of potential clients, which helps to smooth out the ebb and flow of the government contracting schedules,” David points out. “There are a lot of other entities out there that can benefit from what we’re creating, and I see our future growth in the way we’re positioned in the marketplace—not just as a government contractor, but as a provider of meaningful solutions to whatever program challenges are out there.

We also have relationships with many other people who are very experienced and knowledgeable about what’s going on in the marketplace in various sectors, like commercial building,” he adds. “By partnering with these sources, we can leverage that knowledge, with them leveraging us in return. It’s a form of growth in that we’re embracing a new technology or industry that brings energy efficiency solutions to the marketplace.”

Just as remarkable as its innovative approach to business is D&R’s company culture, which is characterized by dual senses of compassion and consensus. “We are very much about bringing people together,” he affirms. “The idea is that we’re all responsible for the future of the company, whether we’re working on a project or trying to bring on a new client. We may not all agree in any one moment, but we all strive to head in the right direction. That’s my focus on a daily basis.”

This leadership philosophy stems directly from David’s childhood, which began in Illinois but transitioned to Maryland when he was eight. His parents were pastors in the Church of the Brethren and co-pastored a church for several years, approaching each day with a passion, integrity, and hard work that molded the characters of their sons. “When your parents are ministers, you’re kind of on the front line in the community, especially in a small town like the ones we lived in,” David observes.

“I learned that your world has to be bigger than your immediate family and friends—it has to entail taking care of your coworkers, of your community. You may not understand what other people need or approve of all that they do in their lives, but they deserve a chance.

They deserve to be cared for. That’s sown into the

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culture of D&R today, trying to take care of each other in the same way.”

David grew up singing in the choirs and playing piano for the church, and there were times he thought he would enter into the ministry himself. “I could see myself going in that direction someday, and I see what I’m doing now as being kind of a pastor in the organization,” he says. “I stay focused on what we’re doing to address the mission we have and to take care of the people who are part of the team, trying to help them achieve the goals and objectives in their career path.”

The concept of team was also central to David’s youth through his passion for sports—a passion that expressed itself vehemently when he served as his school mascot during his senior year. “I got a little more animated than I probably should have been,” he laughs. “To this day, my wife won’t let me watch Redskins games while she’s around because I get too fired up.”

David’s paternal grandfather was a farmer in Ohio who also sold tractors, and observing him left a marked impact on the young man. “Being a farmer, you have to be your own businessman because you run your own operation,” he says. His other grandfather was a tinkerer who made watches and devised machines that would solve various problems around the house. “That sort of ingenuity always captivated me,” he says. “I wasn’t good with my hands, but I was fascinated by the concept of creating an environment that would inspire people to innovate. I don’t have all the answers, but I wanted to be able to offer an opportunity to the people who did have those skills. I wanted to create an environment where we could leverage the talent to create something that would respond to a need, a challenge, a question. That’s what D&R is all about.”

David attended college at Ashland University in Ohio, where he served as Student Senate President for two years and spent summers working on a farm and in a factory on the assembly lines. “I still have scars from the sheet metal I would put through the presses to bend into various forms,” he says. He also interned on Capitol Hill after his sophomore year through a program at Georgetown University. He had political aspirations, drawn to the meaningful work of engaging with the community to address its concerns, but as time went on, he opted for different paths.

After earning a dual degree in political science and religion, as well as a minor in music, David took a position in government affairs with The Timken Company in Canton, Ohio. Over the nine years he

spent there, he moved into a number of other roles in human resources, manufacturing, marketing, and finance. “Experiencing all those roles, I realized that being in government affairs touches just about any part of the company, depending on the issues you deal with,” he says. “I was fascinated by the intersections that occur. It’s not just about building a bearing; it’s about the engineering, technology, human capital, sales, marketing, and continuous improvement that all go into making it happen.”

When David felt it was time for a change, he applied for a position at the Maytag Corporation and flew down to Washington on his own dime, where the man that would become his boss spoke with him for two hours without even seeing his resume. “I was stunned that he would take so much time with me, and he ultimately offered me the job,” David remembers. “He really mentored me along the way in how to deal with government affairs and government officials, and it was hugely beneficial. He taught me a lot about patience and process, which was essential when I came to D&R.” In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, David’s story details the importance not only of generating and expressing good ideas, but also of having the courage to embrace them. “Don’t be afraid to try something,” he urges. “When you’re 22 years old, a lot of people expect you to have all the answers figured out, but don’t get locked into that thinking. Keep your mind open about what else can be possible, because life is long, and you should be open to as many possibilities for achieving success, however you define that, as you can.”

For David, that success is defined in many ways.

It shines most brightly through his son, who makes incredible strides each day toward becoming a man of his own. It shines through the music that laces the air with audible gusto and palpable emotion when he sits down at the piano bench—a place of refuge— and rains passion on the keys. And it shines through his leadership at D&R. “Six years ago, I never would have envisioned being here, doing what I’m doing and enabling the impact we’re making, because I didn’t think it was possible,” he says. “I had different ideas and tracks that I saw myself going down. But I’m very proud to be part of this team and what it’s accomplishing.

Together, we tend to each idea like the community garden we steward just outside our office building— thoughtfully, diligently, innovatively, and for the good of our extended family, whether we know them or not.”

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Julia Stephens No Cause Lost From saving lives to saving entire psychiatric programs, Julia Stephens is no stranger to dire situations.

Be it a personal crisis or a financial one, she’s been called upon to go above and beyond throughout her career.

She’s managed a huge array of support, psychiatric, and therapy programs, tackling psychological issues from almost every angle. She’s specialized in music and art therapy, overseen a variety of programs dedicated to quality of life among seniors, and currently serves as Executive Director of CrisisLink, a hotline which responds to callers in desperate situations, many of them suicide-related. She has dedicated her career to forging pathways of hope where there were none, seeing no lost causes and no dead ends.

Despite her wide-ranging successes, it is a program which could not maintain funding that marked the defining moment of her career. It was the first time she began to move outside of her role as a practitioner to take on the challenge of administration and management, ultimately transforming her goals and ambitions and providing a learning experience that guided her professional decisions from that point forward.

It was the late 1980s, and Julia was working at the Santa Fe Hospital in Kansas as a music and activity therapist.

She began developing an in-patient psychiatric unit for seniors that also provided medical care, an innovation that she describes as, at the time, very cutting edge.

“Psychiatric and medical problems really overlap and interplay in the senior population,” Julia explains.

“You have to go in-depth to assess whether an elderly person is depressed, or instead showing symptoms of dementia.” From her role as a practitioner, she rose to be director of the program, supervising doctors, social workers, and nurses as they transformed the terrain of health care by offering an effective, inspired alternative to the dismissive treatment seniors received elsewhere.

Despite the program’s groundbreaking success, the hospital relied on Medicare as its sole funding stream—a reality that soon forced it to declare bankruptcy and reorganize. It chose to close the medical side of the hospital and maintain their psychiatric center—a move

which proved to be a huge setback for everyone. “They closed the medical side and didn’t stop to think about the fact that psychiatric patients need a pharmacy,” Julia remarks. “They closed the lab where they did the blood work.”

With these changes, the management of the psychiatric program worked overtime to restore the cancelled services to their patients. Charged with getting the lab back up and running, Julia learned more than her fair share about reagents and testing as she successfully returned the facility to its former functionality, only to be told, finally, that the entire hospital would have to shutter. “It was very painful,” she remembers. “After all that energy and effort put into saving the hospital, we had to shut it down and find new hospitals for our patients. We had developed this program that had a huge impact, and to close it down was very devastating.” The incident stuck with her, and Julia has since dedicated her career to managing, building, and maintaining successful programs with diversified funding sources.

“From that point on, I have always made it my business to make sure a project has multiple funding sources so that, if the service is valuable, it can continue no matter what,” she avows.

Today, Julia brings that resolve and passion to CrisisLink, a business begun in 1969 and maintained today on what she calls “the proverbial shoestring budget”—about $650,000 annually—along with the generosity of many well-trained volunteers. Launched by a group of dedicated individuals in Arlington, Virginia, who were concerned about local youth, CrisisLink has expanded exponentially over the decades since. Now a 24/7 hotline, it answered 37,000 calls last year alone, and 7 thousand of those were suicide-related.

Effective and free, CrisisLink is accredited by the American Association of Suicidology and certified as a crisis hotline. Of the suicide-related calls it receives, 93 percent of callers are no longer thinking of killing themselves by the end of the call. CrisisLink volunteers help callers develop a safety plan and identify resources Julia Stephens

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in their area to help them. The other 7 percent of callers need emergency intervention, and in those instances, 911 is called. Due to the complicated and serious nature of such calls, volunteers participate in an intense training program that consists of 60 hours of education, including role playing and on-the-jobtraining, followed by a minimum commitment of 150 hours on the hotline.

Julia has nothing but praise for the CrisisLink volunteers who make the organization possible.

“They’re making a huge commitment to really save lives, and we’re incredibly proud of them and what they do,” she says. “Crisis hotlines have been around for about 50 years and have been very well-researched.

It’s proven that these models are effective—they do save lives, and they do help people through what is generally a very brief, although quite difficult, period.”

Since the economic downturn in particular, CrisisLink has seen a surge in the number of calls, and in a society that still stigmatizes mental illness and suicide, the hotline is a resource used by many who are too afraid to seek help elsewhere. Julia has been with CrisisLink since 2011, when she left her position with the AARP Foundation, but has dedicated her entire career to psychiatric help for those in need. Her experience as an administrator over the years, including her work with a call center program during her time at AARP, made her the ideal candidate to take on the challenge of Crisis Link.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Julia remembers aspiring to be a music therapist at a young age. The field combined two qualities her family emphasized at home—an appreciation for the arts, and an enthusiasm for helping others. She was the youngest of three, and all three children were taught to love music and visual arts by their parents. Their mother, a stay-at-home mom and artist, explored many mediums with them as they grew, including portrait painting, watercolors, and later, silk painting. Their father, an aeronautical engineer, constantly bombarded them with music. “My dad always had public radio playing classical music when he was working,” Julia remembers. “And he loved musicals, so that was everywhere in my house. I grew up very musically trained on the piano and the guitar.

In high school, when I found out there was such a thing as musical therapy, I knew it was something I’d love.”

Julia also cared for the elderly at a young age. Her maternal grandparents and her mother’s aunt lived nearby, and the family would visit them weekly. Later, when Julia’s grandfather got sick, she would go daily.

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moved in with the family, and Julia helped care for them throughout her high school years. She also worked at a local retirement home through college.

Julia’s approach to life embodies the influence of both of her parents. Her father, an accomplished engineer with McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), worked in the space industry just as it got off the ground, so to speak.

He helped develop Gemini, Apollo, and finally the space shuttle, and his talent for engineering carried over into everyday life. “He could build just about anything, from restoring old cars to constructing the pool table in our basement,” she recalls. From him, she inherited an orderly, analytical mind with a talent for creating. From her mother, conversely, she got her creativity and her ability to look at a problem from both new and unique angles.

After high school, Julia left her childhood home in Missouri to attend college at Kansas University. There, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Music Therapy and then took an internship at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, a wonderful opportunity to learn at a vast and respected organization which Julia calls “the Mayo Clinic of psychiatry.” Her internship ultimately turned into a full-time position, and during her time with the Clinic, she also met Eric, a Marriage & Family Therapist, now her husband of 28 years. After a few years there, she returned to school for her Master’s Degree in Music Therapy, then moved on to the Santa Fe Hospital to help them open up their geriatric unit.

The hospital’s heart wrenching closure coincided with a new opportunity for Eric, now a Ph.D., as a professor at Purdue University in Indiana. After a few years there, another, more appealing position opened up at Virginia Tech. It was a step up professionally for her husband, and close to Julia’s sister and parents, who now lived in the DC area as well. The couple moved to Falls Church, VA, and have been there since.

Freshly settled in Virginia, Julia began running an adult daycare center—a day program for seniors—in Northwest DC. The seniors had a wide range of medical issues, and the center, with a nurse on staff, would support them during the day and take them on outings around the city. After that, Julia took a job with the Northern Virginia Family Service (NVFS), a regional social service agency, where she oversaw therapeutic programs including family and individual counseling, counseling in the home, and therapeutic foster care for foster children with emotional disturbances. She grew within the organization and began helping with NVFS’s Quality Improvement, strengthening the organization’s performance by measuring outcomes, determining best

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practices, and managing risk.

From there, she went on to the AARP Foundation.

“It was my first real foray into national programming for seniors,” Julia explains. “AARP helped me grow even more, to the point that I was supervising some legal programs, training attorneys in elder care, and working on elder law.” Although she wasn’t a subject matter expert for that program, or many of the programs she oversaw, the underlying ability that led her to success was her proficiency in program management—the ability to grow and administer them successfully. Given her diverse background, CrisisLink was correctly confident she could apply those winning abilities to their purposes.

“I try to encourage self-sufficiency,” she explains of her leadership style. “There are 99 ways to solve a problem, and to me, that means that while I will have an idea about how to solve a problem, or 2 or 3 or 4 ideas, and while some of them will be good, my staff will have good ideas too. If I ask them what they think or tell them to solve the problem, they’re going to be much more invested and will feel better about it than if I were to solve it for them. Try to engage people in the process, and they will own the results and be a part of the change.” Julia attempts to consistently apply this

philosophy to her volunteers, whom, she is quick to note, are not there to do busy work. They are capable and want to effect real change, and she strives to provide that possibility.

As Julia works to shore up funding for CrisisLink so that it can continue the critical support it provides in peoples’ darkest hours, she continues her lifelong passion for the art world by focusing her personal charitable interests upon the funding of arts programs in schools, along with support for food kitchens and shelters. And in looking toward the future, she has advice both practical and philosophical for young people entering the working world today. First, she urges youth to begin saving money right away—even $25 a month will make a difference in the long term.

Just as importantly, she emphasizes volunteering. “Find something you’re interested in, or you don’t know about and want to learn about,” she urges. “Be a part of your community and work to make it better. You’ll form lifelong friendships and networks that you’ll never regret. We can all give back.” As the living manifestation of this creed, Julia has spent her life giving back in myriad ways to those in desperate straits. For her, there has never been a project too ambitious, a patient too desperate, or a cause too lost.

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Chris Syllaba Honoring the Old While Building the New Chris Syllaba can still remember being a young boy and hearing the tune of the radio jingle for Jordan Kitt’s Music, the company that sold pianos throughout the D.C. metropolitan area. Perhaps it left such a marked imprint on his mind because he had taken up piano before his fifth birthday and would practice several hours a day. While it was his mother who had first said that one of her sons would surely play the piano, it was his father who modeled the meticulous attention to detail, unwavering discipline, and tireless work ethic that kept Chris attentive and dedicated at the piano bench each day.

While he was ambitious, intelligent, and well-traveled, Chris’s father was also a disciplinarian and perfectionist, which proved difficult for some, but not for Chris. The two had an undeniable chemistry. That’s why his father’s untimely death when Chris was only fifteen years old marks a pivotal turning point in his life. “I lost some of my motivation, and my grades began to suffer,” he remembers. “I became very independent at a young age, which was a double-edged sword.”

In the wake of his father’s death, his mother received an insurance payout, and she decided to use some of the money to buy a piano for Chris. In this way, it was his father’s tragic death that sent him into the Jordan Kitt’s store at the Montgomery Mall for the first time. Several years later, a few months after he graduated from high school in 1984, he was wandering through the mall again and noticed the store. He had decided to take some time off before going to college and was looking for a job, which compelled him to walk into the Jordan Kitt’s store to ask if they were hiring. Now, over thirty years later, Chris is the President of Jordan Kitt’s Music, paying homage to his father’s legacy while building his own as the man who kept a century-old company from shutting its doors.

Jordan Kitt’s was founded in 1912 by Arthur Jordan and Homer L. Kitt. Its first store, located at 13th and G Street in Washington, DC, lasted through 1986, surviving the Great Depression and World War II. In the early 1940s, the owners passed away, and the

company, part of the Arthur Jordan Foundation, was run by Frances Jones, the woman who had been Homer Kitt’s secretary. She became the general manager until, in 1971, the rules and regulations for foundations changed such that they could no longer own for-profit companies. The business was sold to a management consulting firm called Checci & Co, who named Bill McCormick as the President.

To stay thriving, Jordan Kitt’s evolved with the times.

When the phonograph was invented, they added it to their merchandise. During the Depression, they sold refrigerators and appliances.

In the 1970s, they offered guitars and saxophones. For many years, the company made substantial profits on home organs until that business died out in the 1980s and the baby grand piano took its place.

Now, around 20 percent of their business comes from lessons, service, and home rentals, but their company still lives and dies by piano sales.

Chris has worked for one company in one industry for his whole life—a fact that hints at a streak of conservatism he also inherited from his father. He had escaped to Austria from Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution with only the shirt on his back and gotten work as a translator in a French refugee camp. By his early twenties, he spoke eight languages, and at the invitation of a friend, he moved to Venezuela, where he eventually took a job as a computer programmer with IBM and later married Chris’s mother, a social butterfly with an inherent goodness to her spirit. IBM then transferred the Syllabas to DC, and Chris and his brother were born and raised in Chevy Chase and Bethesda, Maryland.

“My father would have been a tremendous business owner,” Chris remarks. “He was exceedingly capable, but he was overly conservative. I think I got a bit of that from him, considering I didn’t become an entrepreneur in full until the age of 45.”

From the time Chris was 12 years old, his parents served as Independent Business Owners (IBO) for Amway, a direct-selling company that sold products primarily in the health, beauty, and home care markets.

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IBOs earned income from the retail markup on the products they sold, as well as a performance bonus, and could purchase training materials. As a result, Chris was exposed to the importance of financial independence from an early age, and took on a number of his own customers. “I was sponsoring people, and looking back on that experience, it was kind of like running my own business,” he reflects. “I learned a lot from that experience as I attended meetings, seminars, and rallies. It gave me experience influencing people, getting groups together, managing, and selling products.”

When Chris wandered into the Jordan Kitts store in 1984, he wasn’t sure what kind of job he was looking for, but he was interested in working and earning money. The manager at the time, Dave Hunter, looked Chris up and down and, judging by the boy’s jeans and t-shirt, commented that they didn’t normally hire stock boys. Taking no offense, Chris said that he was instead interested in selling pianos. “I didn’t know what retail was,” he laughs. “My idea of a job was Monday through Friday, nine to five. Dave explained how it was commission-based, with long hours. I told him I didn’t think I was interested, but as our conversation unfolded for another hour and a half, my feelings changed.”

As luck would have it, one of Dave’s top salespeople had just quit the week before. He decided to hire Chris, who remembers being excited about the job from day one. “I still remember how it felt to receive that first paycheck,” he recalls. “I loved the concept of having a job and something to do. Also, I’m an introvert by nature, but working in that capacity as a salesperson makes you an automatic extrovert, which I liked. And in the end, I loved the art of selling—the process of figuring out what the person wants, what’s best for them, and getting them to say yes.”

Chris sold his first Steinway piano for $20,000 in 1984, and until 1989, his skills were honed and applied across several of the company’s 22 stores. He also spent a month at their Fairfax store filling in for their manager, paving the way for an opportunity in 1989 to manage a store himself. “I didn’t quite jump at the opportunity,” he remembers. “I was working at Lake Forest Mall at the time and making good money. The management opportunity would make me responsible for the worstperforming store in the company, in Iverson Mall, where the lease was expiring in four months.” Chris’s mentors confirmed that the amount of money he would make managing the store would be the same or less than what he was making as a salesperson, but that it was a good long-term move because he could get management experience and really show the company what he was 142

made of. Thus, he accepted, and during the first hourlong commute, he found himself again excited for his first day on a new job.

The four months spent managing the Iverson store proved to be the ideal training ground for Chris to build his skill set, and by the fourth month, the store surpassed its budget in sales. Through the next several years, he continued to work as a store manager, most notably at the Montgomery Mall store, their highest producing mall store at the time, and the secondhighest producing store in the chain. Chris managed that store for three years until he was presented with the opportunity to run the company’s Tidewater market—a store in Virginia Beach and an underperforming mall store in Hampton, Virginia. Again, he would take a pay cut, but he would be managing a market, which went beyond selling pianos to encapsulate the management of a delivery crew, institutional business working with schools, service, and lessons. “It was my first experience quasi-running a mini company, and I really enjoyed it,” he remarks.

Then, in 1997, Chris was brought back to DC, where he worked out of corporate for the first time. He served as the digital piano merchandise manager for the company, a $5 million part of the business at retail. He also managed their outside promotions, loaning pianos to universities on the condition that the universities send an annual letter to their alumni advertising the pianos at discounted rates. At one point, Jordan Kitt’s did around $10 million a year in outside sales alone.

With time, Chris was promoted to VP, and then to executive VP. By the time McCormick passed away in 2007, he had passed the presidency to his son-in-law, Rick Grant, an intelligent and hardworking individual who had been one of IBM’s youngest partners. “He came with great ideas and infused the company with a new energy,” Chris remembers. “He sent me to Chicago and gave me complete latitude to run that market from 2008 to 2010, which was similar to what I had done in Tidewater but on a much bigger scale. There’s a transition from employee to business owner for which there is no preparation, but I learned skills from Rick that really helped ease that transition in the future.”

When Rick came onboard, the company was doing nearly $50 million in sales, but by mid-2008, the Recession was underway and the financial crisis had just hit. By 2009, the acoustic piano industry was dropping at a rate of 15 to 25 percent per year, and the Jordan Kitt’s leadership team had some tough decisions to face. They started having monthly meetings in 2009

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to look at the numbers and decide what they needed to do, resulting in several painful waves of layoffs and several store closures.

Ultimately, Chris asked Rick if he and the McCormick family would be interested in selling the company to him. Rick agreed, and that’s when Chris and a colleague, Ray Fugere, began negotiating the purchase for the company. “That was a defining moment in my career,” Chris affirms. “I remember the conversation with Ray just prior. I was in our small Atlanta store talking to him on my cell phone, and for the first time, the idea came up that we would try to acquire the company. Then the issue was, how to approach Rick with this proposal?”

Chris knew it had to be in person, so he flew to D.C. for a meeting. Much to his surprise, the first words from Rick’s mouth upon hearing the proposal were, “I think that might be a great idea.” With that, Chris bought the Washington Baltimore market, as well as the Atlanta market. The Jordan Kitt’s Southern Virginia market was shut down, and Steinway took over its Chicago stores as a corporate market.

Today, Chris has four retail stores and two teaching studios that were opened under the new company. “I’ve learned the back end of running a business so well,” he says. “I’ve really come to understand the importance of lining up financing, and of banking relationships. I developed a relationship with a small bank in DC where we have a credit line, with GE Capital, with the finance people at Steinway, and with Yamaha’s finance people.

Then, recently, we started a relationship with North Point Commercial Finance in Atlanta, a company that finances keyboards. We’ve just now refinanced the entire Steinway flooring under North Point, which has been a great move.”

After all is said and done, Chris has no regrets about the steady ascension of his professional path. From the child who heard the Jordan Kitt’s jingle on the radio, to the lost youth who wandered into its store, to the committed and innovative President he is today, he took a hundred-year-old company that was about to disappear and made it smaller, leaner, meaner, and— most importantly—kept it afloat. “It’s been a complete rebirth in terms of employee satisfaction,” he reports.

“The salespeople were counting the days to closing the deal on June 10th, 2011. The growth in sales from 2011 to 2012 was well over a million dollars, and all four retail stores have had significant growth. The employees are happy and motivated again. We’ve replenished our inventory, which makes sales possible. We’ve shored up

the financing and reestablished relationships with the vendors. We’re making it happen.”

Respect is the glue that binds Chris and his employees, and absolute honesty and integrity are the cornerstones of his approach to communicating with those who look to him for leadership. Especially in delivering bad news, Chris is direct, clear, and respectful. “My leadership style is more collaborative,” he remarks. “What I ask my salespeople and managers to do, I must also be able to do. My employees know that I know from personal experience what it takes to sell pianos, to run a store, to merchandise and market properly. It’s a trite saying, but managing by example is important. I also think it’s important to know exactly what you want everyone to do and to lay out clearly what their jobs are and what your expectations are.”

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Chris emphasizes the importance of personal relationships to one’s career and life. “My success has been about my personal relationships— whether it’s friends and family, employees, customers, vendors, or banks,” he avows. “Beyond that, it’s important to work hard, work smart, and have integrity. People can sense whether you have integrity and what your character is. Respect for your elders is also key. You can have your own ideas and thoughts and completely disagree with someone, but you have to have respect for the fact that they might have life experience you don’t have. Whether you agree with them or not, there’s always something you can learn from them.”

To adopt these winning characteristics, one need only pause and think critically about one’s life choices and patterns of interaction. That’s why Chris has a small triangular wooden sign on his desk with the simple word Think inscribed on it. “To me, it’s not a word, but a saying,” Chris explains. “It represents how one should go through life, thinking about things before acting.” The sign came from his grandfather from his days at IBM and continues to guide him as he builds out his own legacy by also building the legacies of those who came before him, and those who come after. Because saving a hundred-year old company isn’t about any one person’s legacy. Rather, it’s about all the lives it’s touched through the years through its owners, employees, and clients. And perhaps more importantly, it’s about Chris’s commitment to help struggling young people get their start through Jordan Kitt’s, just as he found his there nearly four decades ago.

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Solomon Thompson, Jr. The Crusader Solomon Thompson felt the frustration and helplessness well up in his throat as the policemen questioned him. A junior at the University of Pennsylvania, he didn’t have much time to spare. He frequently rode his bike to campus in the evenings, but on this particular night, a woman had been mugged in the neighborhood by a black man on a bike—someone that loosely fit Solomon’s appearance.

It took a half hour for the police to allow Solomon to continue on his way, but the experience was burned into his memory forever. “I knew that, when I grew up, I wanted to change the world,” he remembers. “I wanted to give people more control over their lives, and I wanted to help create a world where people’s success is based on their actions, not on their appearance.”

After reading the autobiographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who empowered people by bringing down the cost of computer power and eliminating the barriers to entry that kept businesses from competing in the marketplace, Solomon’s life mission expanded even further. He saw how women, minorities, disabled individuals, and even small businesses were at a disadvantage, and he wanted to do something about it. He became a crusader for change. Now the cofounder, President and CEO of Blue Collar Objects, a company that uses open source software to keep costs low but computing power high, Solomon has joined the ranks of these innovative game changers, empowering those who have something to offer with a platform upon which to share it.

Solomon launched the company with his partner, Eric Sedor, whom he met while working on a project together at IBM. They were traveling consultants helping Fortune 100 companies build software, and they both noted the stress of being on the road. The toll that current business practices and expectations have on families really hit home when Solomon came home from a business trip to find that his three year old son, whom he had taught to play Moonlight Sonata, no longer showed interest in the piano. “I found myself wondering, how might companies and families change

if people were able to form teams across geographic expanses to get a job done?” he says. “We reasoned that where a person was located shouldn’t necessarily matter, as long as there was a methodology for organizing the work of the various team members.”

At the time, the cost of telecommuting services was dropping rapidly. Solomon and Eric dreamed of building a platform where companies could leverage the best minds from anywhere and minimize the compromise between quality of life and work. “It wasn’t about building a product, it was about building an ecosystem—an environment where people with gifts could contribute,” he explains. With this in mind, they launched Blue Collar Objects with the philosophy that the worth of an individual is not based on role. “Whether you’re a secretary or a CEO, it doesn’t matter—everybody has valuable inputs, and everybody should roll their sleeves up and get the job done,” Solomon points out. “We wanted to eliminate the notion of empty blue suits—people who look good and can market themselves, but who don’t really understand the technology or the work.”

Thus, Blue Collar is all about value added—breaking the problem into small pieces, getting the client to prioritize, and delivering incremental pockets of value so that, when budgets get tight, the most important things are prioritized.

Blue Collar Objects was launched on March 13, 2000. Solomon left IBM first, and since that time, the two partners have wrestled with concepts, teams, and technology. The first piece of software they built failed, as well as the second and third, but they kept trying. “Part of our belief is, fail early,” Solomon says confidently. “We believe failure is essential to understanding how to do anything. Baby’s fail—they bump into things and burn themselves. We tried, failed, learned the lesson, and have been constantly evolving that way. We’re experts at this methodology of writing software by constantly doing retrospectives, looking at what went well, what didn’t, developing solutions, and then continuing on to the next sprint or iteration.

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This process assumes failure. You embrace it. You want transparency. You don’t want a culture where, if something goes wrong, people feel ashamed. You want a culture where people will plaster it up and see what happened so they don’t make the same mistakes again.

We didn’t invent this way of thinking—the spirit of this approach is captured in the Agile Manifesto.”

Solomon’s approach to business boasts an element of bravery that certainly stems from his parents, who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1950s. His father had worked on both bicycles and houses in Jamaica, but the economy prompted the Thompsons to move to England, where he worked as a machinist. Shortly afterward, his mother happened to take a boat to America and met somebody named Arthur Fisher, who decided to sponsor her and her husband to come to America. “It was chance,” Solomon says.

Born in the Bronx, Solomon was the youngest of five children, and attended Catholic elementary school, followed by Bronx Science School. Music was sacred in their family, and his parents bought a used baby grand piano that everyone would gather around to sing. When Solomon was eight, a neighbor told them about an audition at the Lincoln Center, and he got the part. He then auditioned for the children’s chorus, which he got into and sang for until he was thirteen, at which time he started taking piano lessons.

He ran track, practiced his music, played with friends, collected comics, saw ballets at the Lincoln Center where he sang, and expanded from the rich diversity that enlivened his days. His brother, eight years his senior, loved math and taught him calculus before he got into college, as well as a love of jazz.

Combined, the Thompsons couldn’t have been making more than $40,000 by the time they retired, but they filled their children’s lives with a sense of wonder that was just as strong as the values they instilled in them and the legacy they left. “They valued us—making sure we had an education,” Solomon emphasizes. “Every one of us graduated from college.

They also valued music. We all took lessons of some sort, and we had the piano in the house. We had a minor income, and they chose to spend their money on music and education. As a family, we didn’t take vacations or eat out. Sneaking out to McDonalds was a big deal. They were always there for us. They taught us commitment. My dad would say, ‘The long road draws sweat, the shortcut draws blood.’”

Remembering his childhood, Solomon perhaps recalls most fondly the bridge of balsa wood that he and his father built together for a science competition 146

in high school. The students were challenged to build the lightest bridge that could support the most weight.

“My father explained things and gave me an intuitive understanding of forces just by talking about them,” Solomon remembers. “We got first place, and that gave me so much pride, because many of the students I was competing against had college-educated parents to help them. My parents didn’t even graduate from high school, but he brought a self-taught value and meaning to the table that helped show me what was truly important in life.”

Solomon’s first job was as a summer camp counselor.

Another summer, he worked for Manufacturers Hanover Bank, where he was a waiter in the lunchroom. He then attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed an awareness of politics and history that deepened his understanding of the world even further.

After graduating, Solomon began working as a programmer for Grumman Aerospace, which he developed a furious passion for computers. Expanding upon that passion, he took several courses at City College in New York on operating systems. He stayed on to pursue his master’s and also took a job at the Department of Corrections in New York City, doing database work while going to school at night. “I would study on the train, get to work, go to school, do musical stuff on the side, and make sure that every minute was accounted for,” he recalls. After he graduated from that program, he went to work for IBM, where he stayed for 10 years.

While at IBM, Solomon did something he had never done before—he stood up to, and yelled at, someone in the workplace who cursed at him. “Before that, I would express my position but would always subdue my true feelings in the name of preserving the peace,” he explains. “But to stand up for what I believed in and what I thought was right, aggressively—that was truly liberating. It led me to realize I was showing a different face to each context I would enter, whether it was with my parents, my friends, or the workplace. I would talk to whomever in the appropriate vernacular. I developed the school face, the work face. It wasn’t clear who I was because I never had a desire to win an argument.

But that breakthrough led me to the realization that conflict is good. It’s about idea Darwinism, and how that helps the world to evolve. I want the best ideas to survive, but that means those ideas have to get out in the world.”

Venturing forth and creating Blue Collar Objects is one such idea. “It wasn’t so much an entrepreneurial

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spirit that I had, as a need to have the opportunity to fail and learn—an opportunity to take control of my future,” Solomon says, remembering that night back in college when the police stopped him because of the way he looked. “Starting the business was about having a vision of wanting to change the world. I didn’t want to be in a protective cocoon where I couldn’t be creative, or invest in things, or fail. In order to change the world, you have to be willing to believe with every fiber of your being in what you’re doing and talk truth to power.”

Today, Blue Collar Objects has developed a concrete product and a clear vision, and that product and vision is BlueJean Time, a piece of software that will facilitate organizing the Work of a Generation. With this focus, Solomon and his team are proving themselves in anticipation of the negotiating table, where they might at some point consider accepting venture funding. “We have an altruistic vision—we want to do good, and don’t want our business model to be driven solely by the bottom line,” he points out. “We need to achieve a couple more things before we accept external money and the strings it’s inevitably attached to. From a values perspective, we always put people first, and from an ethics perspective, we always put ourselves to the Washington Post Test—if what we’re doing were to show up on the cover of the newspaper, would we be cool with it? We make sure to always pass that test.”

After leaving IBM and starting the company in March of 2000, Solomon calculated that the family would run out of money by September of that year.

By June, it was clear none of their product ideas were going to work, so he took on a consulting gig. He and his wife, Jean, both knew how to write code, and their friends would come over and discuss business and life. They knew they wanted to eventually come back to the product concept, but in DC, companies must be more established to attract investment. So they decided to focus on establishing themselves, building a reputation, securing a cash flow, and revisiting the product idea later.

Today, Solomon’s wife, Jean, is the CFO of Blue Collar Objects, and Eric serves as the Chief Technology Officer. Now a team of between 30 and 40, Solomon measures the company’s success in impact. “Our vision is to organize the work of a generation, and our mission is to empower leaders to, very simply, organize the work of distributed teams,” says Solomon. “At a time when technology is being used to communicate with and organize people all over the world, the Blue Collar team is focused on the science of work. Our

core competence is about understanding how to get things done and the pros and cons of different kinds of collaboration. Additionally, we understand the problem of context management, or the need for this generation to be able to manage family life, work life, and the many other contexts that demand its time.

With today’s increasingly transparent patterns of relating to one another via Facebook and Instagram, we see that work requires a need for privacy, security, and the protection of intellectual property. With this in mind, we build our tools around finding the right balance between the social aspects used to keep team members engaged, the privacy aspects to make sure collaboration is done securely, and the need to switch seamlessly between different contexts. What we do is more than a science; it’s an art.”

In addition to the wisdom of crowds, which draws upon the knowledge base of many to fill in individual blind spots and evolve effective approaches, Solomon’s leadership style rests upon a bedrock of self-knowledge.

Just as Bill Gates would take a week away each year to read and reflect on the best route forward, Solomon has gone on similar retreats twice a year for the last five years. On these retreats, he reflects on four dimensions of life: family, business, community, and self. What went well and what hasn’t? “It’s easy for me to lose myself in all of these dimensions, so separating them out and looking at them retrospectively is especially helpful,” he points out.

Another cornerstone of his approach is giving back, as demonstrated when he and several friends started an organization called College Tribe, which provides scholarships to help young black boys pursue their college educations. Blue Collar Objects has also donated their services to the Fairfax County Youth Football League to help better organize recruitment and team functioning.

“I’m so amazed at how blessed I’ve been in so many respects,” Solomon marvels today. “I never dreamed we’d live in the house we live in now. I never dreamed we’d run a company. The ability to be in a controlling position in an organization that’s trying to do good is a dream I never had that came true. But what I’m most proud of, is working to change the image of black people. As human beings, we’re hardwired to stereotype, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It helps us to make quick decisions and survive. But the image of black people as either entertainers or criminals needs to change, and I’m proud to contribute to a world where people are judged by their actions, not by their appearances.”

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In advising young entrepreneurs entering the workforce today, Solomon urges them to become excellent at something—what that something is, is up to them. “My son is consistently staying up till 3 am working on music, and he’s getting better and better,” he says. “He’s learning what it takes to be great at something.

Becoming really good at something provides you a pathway to become good at anything. Today, with the United States operating on a global scale and competing with India and China, the lowest cost, best value option ends up getting the work, and if you’re not excellent at

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something, you won’t get picked. Business is becoming less and less about relationships, and more about the value added. Needs will shift and change, but real excellence will always be in demand.”

In this pursuit of excellence, one achieves not only success, but also an unparalleled sense of freedom—one that unleashes the soul of the crusader as he or she seeks to free others from the societal blockades that hold them back. “It’s a commitment to never say die,” Solomon emphasizes. “It’s the commitment that says, this thing is going to succeed. That’s how you change the world.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

Roger Waldron Common Sense In a small agricultural town in Northern Maine, the art and science of potato farming breeds its own strains of common sense. Schools throughout the county used to begin in mid-August, run for a month, and then close in September so that students in grades six through twelve could spend three to four weeks helping their families and picking potatoes. Most farmers in the area couldn’t afford automated harvesters, so the community came together to pitch in and manually pick potatoes for forty-five cents a barrel. School buses would pick students up at dawn and transport them directly to the fields, where they were assigned a section for the day based on how efficient a worker they were.

As a young boy, Roger Waldron was one of those students. “We would get competitive in the fields, trying to find the best and fastest way to pick the potatoes,” he recalls. “But we also helped each other if someone was having a bad day, or if their section was just too big.”

Because of the harvest, there were no football teams in his town, so basketball became a central uniting force in their small town. In fact, the community revolved around the winter basketball season. Roger played from sixth to twelfth grade, serving three years on the varsity team and one year as captain. “We had a court in our hometown that everybody played on,” he recalls. “High school students, college students, even guys from the Air Force base would come down to play on our little court.”

Whether it was in the field or on the court, Roger’s innate love of intellect and reason was most alive when people from diverse walks of life were brought together.

In such company, he was fueled by the exchange of knowledge and leaps of innovation that inevitably flowed from open communication. He observed how common sense is built through the realization of common goals, and how both contribute so vitally to the common good. Now, as President of The Coalition for Government Procurement (The Coalition), a trade association that has specialized in “advocating for common sense in federal acquisition” for over

thirty years, Roger is committed to promoting these principles across a national spectrum, changing the way government and industry work together today.

Comprised of approximately 250 member firms, the Coalition serves to promote “common sense” policies that improve acquisition for government and industry players, as well as for the taxpayer. “Our membership provides the vast majority of commercial solutions to the federal government,” Roger explains. “We embrace the concept of open communication because the importance of promoting an ongoing dialogue between the government and the industry can’t be overstated. It’s the only way to better understand what the government’s issues and concerns are versus those of the industries.” The Coalition sees government contracts as partnerships that must work for both sides in order to have a positive outcome. “The government wants a great outcome, but it also has to be a business opportunity for the people on the other side,” he reasons.

“You have to find that perfect balance, which requires a public conversation.”

Through his work with the Coalition, Roger works closely with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), as well as the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“We provide a platform where discussions can take place between the government and industry in a setting that focuses on operational issues,” Roger says of the Coalition’s memberships. “We engage members directly, inviting agencies to our meetings to talk about what they are doing to create positive business intelligence. Having these conversations in this kind of a framework is a big benefit.” Additionally, the Coalition advocates on behalf of its membership, providing feedback and strong insights on policies in the process of implementation through the federal rulemaking process. “The Coalition’s full name is The Coalition for Common Sense in Government Procurement,” Roger details. “Our goal is really to provide sound business opportunities for the private sector that result in the best value for customer agencies in the government.”

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While there may be other associations that are similar in their nature of work, the Coalition is set apart by its diversity and range of membership. “Our association is unique in that we cut across the spectrum of commercial firms,” Roger remarks. “We don’t just focus on information technology; we also have furniture companies and office supply companies. We cover what is basically representative of what is being bought in the commercial marketplace.” With this in mind, the Coalition is comprised of ten committees, including a furniture committee, office products committee, services committee, IT committee, green committee, and public buildings committee. “We differ from similar associations in that we do cut across all industry sectors,” he affirms.

Roger’s untiring commitment to promoting deep understanding between government, industry, and individuals stems from a fierce commitment to intellectual advancement that stems in large part from his father’s influence early in life. The senior Waldron attended Bowdoin College before earning his law degree from Harvard University, and after working for two large banks, he continues to run a small law practice today, even after two hip replacements. He always pushed Roger to get involved in as many opportunities as he could. “My Dad always told me that I should do well in school because I had the ability,” Roger recalls.

“What he really gave me—something that has stayed with me throughout my life—is a deep and genuine intellectual curiosity.” From a young age, Roger found he wanted to learn, always flipping through his father’s political magazines and even watching the Watergate hearings on TV after school.

While receiving a head-start from his father intellectually, Roger also learned the value of hard work from an early age. After several seasons helping out with potato picking, he decided to get a job delivering mail at the bank where his father worked before school and during vacations. Potato picking taught him the true meaning of hard work, but working at the bank taught him more specific lessons about being a team player, such as how to uphold one’s commitments and responsibilities, as well as how to be part of an organization.

During his childhood, Roger aspired to become a basketball coach when he grew up because of the important role it played in his community, but he found himself slowly growing away from that idea as time went by and instead focusing his attention on politics—a field for which his father also cultivated his passion. Like his father, he attended Bowdoin College, where he studied 150

government and history before working in the Maine legislature for a year as an aide. He went on to attend law school at the University of Richmond, especially appreciating the experience of being in a new place that wasn’t too far from home.

After graduating from law school, Roger started interviewing for jobs in the federal government in Washington, D.C., and stumbled into government contracts by a stroke of luck when he was hired by GSA. “I think things happen for a reason, because I love that I’m in government contracting,” he says. “It impacts everything the government does while also connecting intimately with the private sector, and I love working in that capacity.”

During his first three years working at GSA, Roger learned about procurement, working with the Federal Supply Service and the Federal Technology Service.

He credits Stuart Young, his office mate at that time, for being a particularly influential mentor in his career. “Stuart trained me to be a great attorney,” Roger describes. “He helped me learn to think analytically and in a practical way.”

In 1991, he went to work for the GSA’s Federal Computer Acquisition Center (FEDCAC) in Lexington, MA, where he was the only attorney on staff. FEDCAC focused on conducting high-dollar IT procurements for other government agencies at the time, and Roger served as counsel to FEDCAC for five years, working on several major procurements during the law change in 1996. One such project included the integrative automotive fingerprint ID system for the FBI, which pushed the envelope in terms of technology at that time. “It was a great experience,” he recalls. “I grew a lot during that time, since I was the only attorney and had to make a lot of judgment calls.”

Along with the law changes in 1996, GSA was downsizing at the time, so Roger returned to Washington, where he was able to work on reforming the Multiple Award Schedule program that has grown to over $50 billion in annual purchases by customer agencies utilizing its contracts. In 2001, he went on a detail to manage an office in the Federal Supply Service, which led to a job as manager, working on policy and operational guidelines. He worked in that capacity for several years and then went on a new detail to the Office of the Chief Acquisition Officer, where he served as the Acting Senior Procurement Executive for about 18 months. “I love that I was able to do so many different things at GSA,” Roger affirms. “That’s a great thing about government service—any job is what you make of it. Doing such a wide range of things gave me a great

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background for what came next.”

Throughout his time at GSA, Roger frequently interfaced with the Coalition, developing a deep respect for the company and the good work it did. Then, in 2003, the Executive Office of the President named him a government representative on the Services and Acquisitions Reform Act (SARA), a panel of experts authorized to review the current system. The chairman of the panel was Marcia Madsen, who heads up government contracts at Mayer Brown LLP. After the panel ended, Roger was ready for a career change. “I had done everything I possibly could at GSA,” he says of his decision to leave after twenty years.

“I had started looking around when Marcia asked me if I would be interested in joining the firm to work in their government contracts practice. It was an alignment, so I decided to try it out. It was a great learning experience for me and really improved me as a lawyer in terms of my writing. We would sit and analyze one word in a sentence, checking its implications, wondering what response it would evoke, hoping it made the right point.

It really raised the bar for me professionally.”

Roger had spent four years with Mayer Brown when Bill Gormley, chairman of the Coalition, approached him about the opportunity to serve as the association’s new President. “I knew Bill from my time at GSA,” Roger explains. “It seemed like such a great opportunity.

I’d be doing policy work from a different perspective and adding a voice on different issues pertaining to common sense in the acquisition process.”

Roger quickly found his new position to be a perfect fit, and leading such a large endeavor has been a new and welcome challenge. Since taking on his current role, he’s made quality his primary focus—both in the events the Coalition puts on, as well as in the influence and expertise being provided to members. “One element I find most rewarding about working at the Coalition is the ability to relate what I’ve learned throughout my career,” he remarks. In addition to his day-to-day work and his focus on the long-term development of the

Coalition, he makes time to write a procurement issues column for the association’s weekly newsletter, the Friday Flash, affording insight and recommendations.

While the Coalition continues to do well in the business world, Roger is most proud of its dedication to giving back, most notably by hosting a yearly charity golf tournament to help wounded veterans. On a personal level, he feels most proud of his wife and three children, hoping to instill in them the same level of intellectual curiosity that has led him to the success in business he sees today.

Reflecting back over his professional journey, Roger identifies leadership as greatly dependent upon picking the right people, and upon showing those people appreciation. “You have to make sure folks understand their roles and have the tools to be successful,” he explains. “They have to take ownership over the success and quality of a role I put them in.” On a more personal level, he believes there is great value as a leader in showing your dedication to the mission of the company, while also maintaining open lines of communication.

“With small organizations, you’re truly all in it together, so you have to be very open and listen,” he continues.

“You also have to foster a creative environment where people are willing to throw out ideas and engage.

Without that, you can’t engender the kind of innovation an organization needs to remain at the forefront of its field.”

In advising entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Roger stresses the importance of being flexible. “The pace of change is so much faster these days,” he observes. “With that in mind, make a commitment to be flexible, open minded, and able to adapt. That’s a lot of what youth is, so take strides to preserve that trait as you grow and develop, both personally and professionally.” He also strongly believes in the importance of developing expertise in an area. “If you’re an expert, that stays with you,” he affirms. “You’re a thought leader.” As his life’s work demonstrates, it’s only common sense.

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Mark Watts Shooting and Scoring The son of a successful high school basketball coach, Mark Watts was practically raised on the court. The oldest of three boys, Watts threw his heart into the sport from an early age, devoting a tremendous amount of time to practice in hope of one day becoming a star player on his father’s team. “I would go wherever my dad went,” he recalls. “My world revolved around it.”

Now a partner at the CST Group, a Reston, Virginiabased certified public accounting firm serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region, Watts applies the drive, dedication, and skill he used when playing basketball in his youth to shoot and score for his clients.

But it was more than just the spirit of play that Watts learned from his family while growing up in Ohio. Hard work, discipline, and success were hallmarks of his upbringing. His mother worked as a teacher’s aide while his father, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, was a well-known basketball coach. It was not uncommon for Coach Watts’s teams to go undefeated and for his players to be recruited by Division I universities. His father’s achievements were recognized with multiple awards and honors, including the state of Ohio’s “Coach of the Year” award. Coach Watts’s leadership and success made him a role model not just for his players, but for his oldest son as well.

Not surprisingly, Watts’s father ran a tight ship at home. “We had to be up at a certain time in the morning, make our beds, do our chores, and always focus on academics,” Watts recounts. “If there was time left over, we could play sports, which of course needed to be practiced a lot if you wanted to be good.”

Although sports took up a lot of Watts’s time, he always made sure he worked during his summer vacations. During these summers, he worked at a local farm where he would pick potatoes for eight cents a bushel. “That was my first experience with accounting,” he recalls fondly. “They assigned us each a number and gave us a set of tags. You put one of your tags on the bushel after you filled it, and at the end of the day, they paid you for each of your tags. For some reason, I could

never get mine to add up. I counted and recounted, but it always seemed like they paid me too little. Finally I asked my dad if they were short-changing their employees. He told me they were, and that he knew I would work that fact out for myself. We always got a big kick out of that.”

When Watts was in the fifth grade, he became intrigued by the house being built across the street from where he lived. After watching the construction work being done, he went over to the house and began chiseling mortar off old bricks.

The workers took notice of his efforts and decided to pay him a penny for every brick he cleaned. As a result, Watts spent the rest of his summer hammering the mortar off bricks and ensuring he was compensated fairly this time. He used his hard-earned pennies to buy Hostess cakes with his friends at the convenience store down the street.

As Watts approached his teenage years, his father changed careers, moving the family from Ohio to Fairfax County, Virginia to work as the high school principal at Lake Braddock High School in the Fairfax County public school system. Watts was less than thrilled with the move. He was just entering intermediate school, and suddenly found himself the new kid. “I remember sitting in homeroom with a girl on either side of me, and I was just sweating, not wanting to talk to anybody,” he laughs. “As soon as I got to P.E. class, though, I was happy. I felt at home there and could be myself.”

After the transition of intermediate school, Watts found his stride in high school, where he earned his place on the football, basketball, and track teams. “I met a bunch of teammates during my freshman year who are still some of my best friends today,” he affirms.

When it came time for Watts to attend college, he found he was not sure what career path he wanted to take. He had always appreciated school as an avenue for playing sports instead of for academics, so when he had to decide what to pursue for his career, he leaned heavily on his fascination with the FBI. “When it came Mark Watts

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time to make decisions about my future, I was heavily influenced by all the activity occurring in nearby Washington, D.C.,” he recalls, referring to the Vietnam protests and the Watergate scandal. “My Dad was very connected, so he got me an interview with the FBI. And after that, I was sure it was what I wanted to do. “ During the interview, he was told the FBI was only hiring Special Agent Accountants, so he decided to pursue a degree in accounting. He attended a southern Virginia college, known for its Division III basketball team and noteworthy parties. He played basketball his freshman year before transferring to Asbury College (now Asbury University) in Kentucky for the remainder of school. “At Asbury, I was able to focus equally on playing sports and pursuing my accounting degree. I made some wonderful friends, had a blast, and met a life-changing mentor, Don Winslow.”

Asbury had recently hired Professor Winslow to create and run its accounting department. Watts was one of the first students to go through the program, and he formed a strong mentor/mentee relationship with Winslow. “Don was somebody that really counseled me on my career path, what classes I should be taking, and how I should be studying,” Watts remembers. “He helped me grow from a boy into a man, leaving my old life behind and starting to think like an adult. He really helped me get my feet on the ground.” Devastatingly, Winslow was killed in a car accident several years after Watts graduated. Despite his short life, Winslow greatly impacted the lives he touched, and Watts attributes many of his best qualities to lessons learned from his influential professor.

Following graduation from Asbury, Watts applied for positions at the FBI. Despite landing several interviews, the agency was not hiring accountants at the time. He then focused his sights on public accounting and was hired by Schreiner, Legge & Co, a CPA firm known for auditing federal credit unions. He then partnered with Jack Wallace to form Wallace and Watts CPAs, in Leesburg, Virginia. Together, they ran the firm for ten years before Watts sold his interest to Wallace.

While the decision to sell his part was a difficult one, Watts believed that in order to further his career, he needed to be part of a larger firm. “If I wanted to grow technically, I needed to be in a place that had the ability to review my work,” he says.

In Reston, Watts saw a job listing with Cocke Szpanka & Taylor PC, now the CST Group. “I knew the co-founder, Mary Szpanka, because we served on the audit committee together at church,” Watts recalls. “So I called her up to say I was interested in the position.”

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During his interview, he told the company that if he was hired, he would bring them a new client every week for the first year. They struck a deal, and in 1997, he joined the team. Looking back, Watts feels certain they hired him regardless of his somewhat outlandish offer, but he held up on his promise.

The CST Group was founded by Charles P. Cocke in 1973. Cocke shared his first small office with an insurance agent over a bowling alley at Fairfax Circle.

His first big client came when Cocke was having lunch one day at the new McDonalds in town. He struck up a conversation with the franchise owner, and the two commenced to do business together for years, even after Cocke moved the firm to Reston. The firm originally only did tax planning, preparation, and compliance, but as the group grew over the years, it formed an assurance department. When Watts began at CST Group, the firm was comprised of approximately fifteen people, and today, the company has grown to 45 employees.

Cocke had a tremendous reputation in the Washington, D.C. area and Watts strived to learn as much as he could from him. “People automatically assumed I was as skilled as Charles, or at least similarly skilled if he trusted me so much,” Watts recalls. “He turned a lot of clients over to me, and I did a good job with them, so he and I worked quite well together.”

The early 2000s provided a lot of growth for the firm, with revenues doubling and morale high. “The economy fell in 2007, but we’ve still done well,” Watts explains. “I think we do a great job in smart growth. It’s easy to use that term, but hard to actually implement it, and often you don’t even know if you’re doing the right thing, but we’ve managed well.” Watts attributes CST’s smart growth in part to the decision to hire young professionals out of university, rather than sticking with the previous method of only hiring individuals with years of experience. “The market dried up, and you could only afford to hire people if they were brand new,” he recounts. “We had to adapt or the machine was going to go stale, and when you go stale, you go backwards. I think that’s what happened to a lot of larger firms. But we drive ourselves really hard at CST Group. Our young professionals are exceptionally bright and talented, and they help fuel the entrepreneurial spirit of our firm.”

Watts has led a successful career path, though his current position is not one he would have pictured himself holding when he was a scrappy fifth grader sliding across the basketball court in Ohio. As a firm partner at the CST Group, he puts the lessons of hard work, discipline, and success from his youth into every project on which he works. “Our organic

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growth is due to our reputation for timely service and great quality,” Watts notes. “The firm has a two-tier internal review process, ensuring that all client work is performed thoroughly and accurately and to the same highest standard. Work performed by a staff CPA, be it a tax return or set of financial statements, is reviewed by a senior manager for quality control. A CST Group partner then always performs the final review, not just for further quality control, but also to look for opportunities to improve the work in a way that the client may not have yet considered.”

The high standards of quality set by the CST Group, along with the firm’s commitment to professional development and work-life balance, have won four Washington Business Journal awards and two Washingtonian Magazine awards as one of the region’s best places to work. Furthermore, Watts was among four CST Group partners to be recognized as a “Top Financial Advisor” by Northern Virginia Magazine in 2012. “It’s a tremendous compliment for the firm,” he says. “We work in a bustling environment and we have a lot of employees with young families. We provide them with an environment where they feel empowered to learn and to grow in their careers.”

The CST Group’s partners plan to continue growing the company wisely. “Taking my father’s coaching as a model, I enjoy inspiring and empowering our talented staff at the firm. I am confident that our business will

continue to grow. It is our young professionals who are our future partners,” Watts says. “I also enjoy the marketing side of the business. I appreciate having the opportunity to promote to others all that we’re doing here at the CST Group.”

While proud of his career path, Watts is proudest of the relationships and the experiences that have led him to become who he is today, both personally and professionally. Topping the extensive list of connections is the one he shares with his wife, Alison, whom he knew he wanted to marry from the first time they met. The Reston community where he works, lives, and plays in equal parts is also a large part of his life today. “I’d like to give back to my community by serving as a volunteer,” he says. “I think people today take for granted the powerful role our communities play in shaping our lives, and I’m thankful to live in a place that takes that role seriously.”

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the workforce today, Watts emphasizes the importance of self-confidence. “Above all, always believe in yourself,” he encourages. “Don’t worry about mistakes. Use the experience of those mistakes to make yourself a better person. Don’t be afraid to tell your employer what you want out of your career. And if you always give 100 percent, everything will turn out just right. By building your skills, strengthening your discipline, learning from your mistakes, and threading your own personal flare through all that you do, every shot scores.”

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Jim White The Creative Process When Jim White was in seventh grade, he decided to enter a piece of his own artwork into National Scholastic Magazine’s poster contest. He’d always been an avid doodler in class, taking after his artistic father, and decided to submit a poster of his own for the simple, sheer joy of the creative process. “I drew two cartoon chipmunks pushing a walnut uphill to the bottom of a tree, and at the top, I wrote ‘Help Nature Conserve’,” Jim smiles, recalling what might best be termed his first masterpiece. “I ended up winning in my category, and the prize was $100, which was a lot of money in the mid 1940’s. That’s when it dawned on me that I was given a gift by the Creator that few are fortunate enough to receive, and that I could actually make a career out of my art. It was what I really wanted to do.”

From that moment on, art became his life. His father had been an artist, doing animation for Disney and Columbia studios, and while he had found success in his career as Chief of Design and Graphics at a major federal government department, he understood the struggles that came with committing to the profession. Despite his reservations for his son, however, he supported Jim completely, and Jim was able to draw upon their combined knowledge and network to become a successful commercial artist and businessman. Now the cofounder and retired president of White+Partners, the largest and most successful independently-owned advertising agency in the Washington D.C. area, he found that the creative process doesn’t only apply to art—it applies to life.

The company was launched in 1964 as Nolan, Duffy & White, named for Jim and his two founding partners. The three had met working at Creative Arts Studio, a large commercial art company, and broke off to create their own design team, working primarily in commercial art and creating brochures, pamphlets, and other marketing tools for a wide range of local businesses and government agencies. After the first seven years of running the gamut in creative trade, they found themselves the top rated design studio in the DC area, though they were a team of only eight employees. Despite their success, however,

they found it nearly impossible to grow beyond the status quo they had reached.

Around this time, large throngs of consulting companies were coming to Washington to work for the government. Jim’s firm began doing graphic design and advertisements for that burgeoning industry until, in 1971, they were approached by one such company that hoped to acquire them. The company had a weak art department and was looking to upgrade by bringing on the small yet talented design team, and while Noland, Duffy, & White was quite successful without outside help, they recognized the merger was their best chance of surpassing their current limits. Thus, Jim and one other partner decided to buy out their third owner and move forward with the merger, seeing the opportunity for growth and networking with the company’s large clientele.

Jim and his partner spent four years with the professional services company, during which he learned invaluable lessons in business. “It was like going to graduate school,” he recalls. “I was suddenly responsible for the financial wellbeing of the entire art division, so I had to start learning how to take the creative process a step further and actually make it profitable.” It was a life changing experience for Jim in that it allowed him to see his profession from the numbers side, which had always been foreign to him.

“One of the things that can happen to creative people in trying to run a business is that they try to run it strictly from the creative side,” says Jim. “When that happens, you forget to make the money that keeps it going as a business, so there are a lot of creative businesses that just go under because they can’t manage.” After the four years, however, the company ran into trouble and was, itself, acquired, prompting Jim to realize he was ready to break away and do his own thing again. With that, in 1975, he bought back his company with the equity he had acquired and renamed his operation E. James White Marketing Communications, later to become White+Partners.

Jim was born in Tennessee to his mother, who was Jim White

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a housewife, and his father, who worked for a printing company as an artist. Shortly after Jim’s birth, his father decided to move the family to California to pursue work in the motion picture industry. He accepted a position as an animator for Disney, but when he discovered the job was an unpaid internship, he instead took a position with Columbia Pictures. He was involved in short subject films as an animator and background artist, and had a hand in the cartoon “Felix the Cat.” Unfortunately, when World War II broke out, Hitler banned all Hollywood productions throughout Europe, which caused the film industry to suffer a severe recession that cost Jim’s father his job. Luckily, Jim’s grandfather was a career marine stationed in D.C., so the family moved to Washington, where his father found work as an artist for the federal government.

From an early age, Jim demonstrated a passion and proficiency not only for art, but also for making sales.

He went door to door through his neighborhood selling whatever he could, from homemade nick-knacks, to ivy he unknowingly uprooted from a churchyard, to his floor waxing capabilities. “I sold as much as I could, and those poor folks in the neighborhood bought it from me,” he laughs. Jim’s family was extremely loving and supportive, which set the groundwork for an unshakable sense of self-confidence and worth. “I wasn’t afraid to take risks and try new things,” he says. “I credit a lot of that to my family, and perhaps some as well to my neighbors supporting whatever I was selling. No one ever beat me down.”

Throughout high school, Jim’s claim to fame was his ability to draw anything, and to draw it well. After graduation, he decided to attend art school in order to fine-tune his skills. “I had a professor in college who was a major influence,” Jim recalls. “He was very demanding and an accomplished commercial artist, and I had to work harder in his class to get good grades than anywhere else. Interestingly enough, he was a businessman as well, not just an academic. That gave him a more robust perspective on life that really contributed to my growth.”

During his college years, Jim spent his summers working as a paid intern at Create Arts Studio, the largest art studio in Washington, grabbing sandwiches for artists on board and delivering packages to clients.

Occasionally, they allowed him to do drawings, and after his second year of college, they offered him a job.

“The man who owned the business at the time was very successful and charismatic. I admired him a lot for what he was doing,” he recalls. “The only condition of the job was that I didn’t return to school. But money was money, and I was learning more in the field than I had 158

been in a classroom, so I took him up on his offer.” With that, in 1956, he left school and began working full time.

Jim spent the following eight years working at the Creative Arts Studio, where he was involved in a wide variety of commercial art, including animation, brochures, and photography. The company was proficient in adapting to whatever the client requested—a skill set that Jim absorbed thoroughly. Throughout his time at the company, he moved up through the ranks until he was named Art Director. It was a prestigious title, yet also marked the highest he’d be able to ascend in the organization. “I saw a lot of other people breaking off from their companies to start their own business, which made me realize that as long as I worked for someone else, my future was limited,” Jim recounts. “I knew how to run a business just from observation and being aggressive about taking opportunities, so I approached my two partners, and we decided to make it happen.”

Although White+Partners has experienced significant growth and development over the near-half century of its lifespan, the company has never failed to offer the highest quality of services in art, design, and advertising.

“I’ve always really valued our reputation because it has my name on it,” he smiles. “In the old days, there were four top design studios in the Washington area, and we were always ranked one or two.” The company has been known for high quality work that adapts to the changing cultural and business world, to such an extent that Jim has worked with big name clients that include National Geographic, Time-Life Book and Records, Amtrak, and the Smithsonian Institution. His work is used to raise awareness, including an anti-smoking poster series involving cartoon animals advising children not to be ‘A dumb bunny!” The posters were featured in elementary schools nationwide, including the schools his own children attended. Years later, Jim’s daughter pulled out one such poster and told him she never once tried a cigarette because the images of his cartoons stayed with her throughout her formative years.

Although he was sure the day would never actually come, Jim eventually retired full time in 1996 as a result of health problems that compromised his vision.

When reading and drawing became more taxing for Jim, he began easing back gradually on his work, slowly beginning to meditate on his next move and the future of the company. The idea of acquisition was entertained; however, Jim wanted more for his company than to become what it once had been during the early 70’s.

He then turned his hopes to his son, Matt, who had earned a degree in Marketing and Communications from Boston University and was at the time working

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

for a major advertising agency in New York City. Jim invited his son to join the family business, which he did in the mid 1980’s. “He had the experience from his work in New York City to see things from another side,” Jim explains. “He had the creativity as well as the insight into how to run a business, so he came in initially from the account side, whereas I had always been on the creative side. Even if I wasn’t directly drawing, all creative output had to pass my eyeballs before it went out the door, so it was important that I found someone I could trust.”

Jim steadily began involving Matt more and more in the management and decision-making process of the company, so that by the time Jim was ready to leave, the company passed seamlessly to Matt’s hands.

Now that Jim has successfully stepped away from day to day management of the company that became White+Partners, he has invested his efforts into creating a long-term plan that will allow Matt to gradually buy all of the company’s shares, keeping the firm in the family.

The plan has been set up in such a way that, should the family decide to do so, Matt can one day pass the company on to one of his two daughters as well.

When it came to leadership challenges, Jim often found himself doing exactly what he asked his team to do—getting creative. “Sometimes there are struggles between the client and one of my creative people, since the client wants things a certain way, and the artists wants to have their creative freedom,” he explains. “When this happens, I remind my artist that the customer pays their salary, so they have to come to some sort of compromise.” While he often acts as the peacekeeper, he finds it equally important to never ask something of an employee that he would not do himself. “It’s essential to treat everyone professionally,” he says. “I don’t tolerate any type of disrespect, whether it’s a client or another employee. I try to run a very professional operation with everyone treating each other well.”

While most aspects of leadership come naturally to Jim, he feels the hardest part of his job has been letting

an employee go. As the economy fluctuates, advertising tends to be the first item on the financial statement to be slashed, so he has been forced to stay in tune with the cycles of the business world around him. While letting a valued employee go has never gotten easier, he finds both comfort and great pride in the success the company has found, and that after nearly a half century of being in business, White+Partners seems to only grow stronger.

In advising young people entering the workforce today, Jim stresses the importance of hard work and perseverance. “Be the best you can possibly be at whatever you do, and it will pay off,” he encourages.

“And don’t be afraid of hard work or hard decisions.”

And as always, Jim emphasizes that the creative process can be applied to one’s career search to engender even greater success: with careful research and preparation, as well as inspiration and passion, barriers fall away.

Now that Jim has settled into retirement, he has been able to revisit his relationship with art on the level with which it began: for the pure pleasure of it. He keeps a studio in his home with ideal lighting and breathtaking mountain views, which inspire him to paint landscapes and seascapes. After a lifetime of creating in order to meet a deadline, he finds joy in working with noncommercial oil paints to create a piece at his own pace, and for his own purposes.

“I love creating something from a blank canvas,” he smiles. “After all this time, it’s still fun, which is why I made a career out of it in the first place.” And while the artistic base of his career has rung true throughout his life, he finds comfort in having been able to apply his creativity to his running a business. “If there’s one thing I have to say about business, it’s that you have to reinvent yourself constantly,” he says. “It’s sort of like driving a car. Only one person can drive at a time, and only one person can make a decision. The passengers can offer their counsel and insight, but ultimately it’s just up to you, the driver, to figure it out. That’s what creativity is all about.”

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Dendy Young In the Arena In a speech given in Paris in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt taught the world what it meant to be in the arena.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better,” Roosevelt explained. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Though they were spoken over a hundred years ago, Dendy Young has used them as the guiding principle of his life, maintaining a steadfast commitment to always remain in the arena, where real life is lived.

He honored them even as a young man growing up in the 1960s in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. While in high school there, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored their first science fair ever to be held outside the U.S. At the insistence of one of his teachers, Dendy set about preparing a submission. He built the circuitry for a rudimentary computer by hand, equipping it with buttons and flashing lights and entering it in the contest. “In typical American largess, everyone who entered was awarded a prize, but the first place award was an all-expensespaid scholarship to a university of one’s choice in the United States,” Dendy remembers. “I won that scholarship, and it changed the course of my life.”

The young man arrived in the U.S. bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing nothing of the world but eager to learn as a new member of MIT’s freshman class.

Today, Dendy is the founder and CEO of McLean Capital, a private equity firm that allows him to take

risks on companies he believes in, as well as the cofounder of a cutting-edge healthcare company called Personalized Cancer Therapy Inc., that aims to change the way cancer care is administered. As the nature of these endeavors would suggest, Dendy isn’t happy unless his days are spent in the arena, covered in the dust and sweat and blood that show he is working for a better future with all he’s got.

This inherent drive to address today’s problems in order to shape tomorrow’s future was a foundational element of Dendy’s upbringing. “Growing up in Rhodesia was very much like being in the American Midwest,” he remembers.

His father was a well–read and thoughtful lawyer, and judge in the Rhodesian High Court. His mother was a homemaker, looking after Dendy and his three younger siblings. Although considered among the elite in their society, they lived not extravagantly, but comfortably.

Rhodesia was founded as recently as 1896 by pioneers, and a pioneering spirit similar to that found in the United States influenced the Young children. “Going through school, it was heavily pressed upon us that we had to work harder because we were responsible for taking the country into the future,” he recalls. “There was certainly that sense of destiny in the schools, and that was very exciting.”

Rhodesia’s educational system was tied to Britain’s in terms of testing for high school graduation and university admission, so Dendy benefited from a world-class education that prepared him well for college in the U.S. “I wanted to take Rhodesia to the next level,” he recalls. “I came to the States to prepare for that role.”

When he first applied to college, he had aspirations to be a physicist, but once he got to MIT, he realized that engineering was more up his alley. He studied computer science and was in the university’s first class to graduate in both electrical engineering and computer science. He also watched closely as an entrepreneurial friend of his got involved in a young business, leading Dendy to conclude that he would one day start his own Dendy Young

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company. “Back in those days, there were no courses in entrepreneurship,” he remembers. “It wasn’t an easy time to start a company, so for me to take that position was somewhat radical, but from that moment on, every incremental decision I made supported that goal.”

By the time he graduated from MIT, Dendy’s parents had been forced, for political reasons, to leave Rhodesia, so he took a job in South Africa with Computer Sciences Corporation. Two years later, having met the U.S. Immigration requirements, he returned to the States to attend business school at Harvard University.

“I was under the impression that I’d really learn the essence of business there,” he remembers. “Then, at a cocktail party after finishing the program, I was asked what I had learned. That’s when I realized that the greatest lesson I had picked up was the fact that, when it comes to business decisions, nobody else knows the answer either! Somehow, I had built up the selfconfidence to say, ‘I’ve done my homework, I know better than anyone else the shape of this elephant, and, when it is time to make the decision, I need to make the decision now.’ It taught me to really have confidence in my gut instinct when it came to business. That didn’t, however, stop me from making a lot of mistakes during my career!”

Fresh out of school, Dendy had the choice to work for Boston Consulting Group for a nice salary, or at a smaller company. “I knew I’d have the chance to learn much more with the smaller company, so I took the lower salary,” he explains. “It was part of my grand plan.”

That move proved serendipitous as well. The small company of 50 employees had just gone through what they thought was a rapid-growth, break-even year, and Dendy came onboard to open their West Coast office.

Three months after he joined the company, however, an audit revealed that it had actually had a “disastrous loss” year. “The bank called the loan, vendors started halting their shipments, and all hell broke loose,” he details. “The CEO immediately fired half the company and called me into the office, giving me the choice to either get fired or to work with him in finance and accounting to try and get the company righted.”

Dendy accepted the challenge. “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” he says. “I learned the CFO role inside and out. I learned how to work with vendors, with the bank, and all the balancing acts you have to go through to stay afloat. We went from 50 employees to 23, but we stabilized.”

Before long, Dendy happened to be introduced to Bob Hanley in Washington, D.C., who captured his imagination immediately. Bob’s three-person 162

technology company, Federal Data Corporation, was doing multimillion-dollar deals with the federal government. Dendy came onboard in 1975 as the VP of Sales, and over the next six years, they grew rapidly.

In the spring of 1981, Dendy left to realize his dream of opening a business of his own. “I had learned a lot, and I had stored up six months’ worth of living expenses,” he recalls. “Though my wife and I had a oneyear-old daughter at the time, she supported the leap of faith a hundred percent and jumped in to help start up our new venture. Luckily, we went cash-flow-positive in time.”

Dendy’s first company, Falcon Systems, Inc., provided large-computer hardware, software, and services to the government, which, at the time, was interested in buying complete solutions. The company grew to $48 million in revenue. Then, one day in 1988, an Oracle representative offered to acquire the company. Although Dendy had no plans to sell at the time, one of his board members, Lee Johnson, pointed out that, when you get an unsolicited offer like that, it’s time to take some cash off the table. Dendy sold Falcon Systems, Inc. and immediately poured most of the resulting cash into another company he had spun off, Falcon Microsystems, Inc. Microsystems sold and leased turn-key microcomputer solutions, and its major coup was the negotiation of an exclusive relationship with Apple Computer representing them on the GSA Schedule.

Dendy grew and streamlined that business until one week in May 1994, when he received three calls from three different companies interested in acquiring Microsystems. Again, a board member advised that it was the right time to sell, so with great reluctance, he sold the company to GTSI, where it greatly exceeded its projections in the subsequent months—a rare triumph for an acquired asset.

Dendy had no job and no plans at that point, and spent 15 months enjoying his young family and looking for the next opportunity. An effort to buy a software company was called off a couple of days before the closing. Then, in December of 1995, the Chairman of the board at GTSI called him to ask if he would sign on as the company’s fourth president in the span of 12 months. The enterprise was in turmoil, and Dendy, anxious to get back in the arena, was interested in trying his hand at running a public company. With that, he became President of GTSI and served in that capacity for ten years.

He spent the first 18 months putting the company back on solid footing. The feat was rendered difficult,

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 6

in part, by an investigation by the Department of Justice, which was costing the company over $1 million per year in legal fees. In the end, Dendy hired a more aggressive law firm, which helped GTSI demonstrate to Justice that every allegation was unfounded. “All in all, it was a tremendous personal education,” he affirms.

“I was there, covered in dust and sweat and blood and having fun! The only thing that really disappointed me was how difficult it was to change the culture of GTSI. We had built such wonderful cultures at my two earlier companies, but it took a long time to transform such a large company into a more aggressive, pristine, well-run atmosphere. In retrospect, I’m sure there were things I could have done to make that change faster, but at the time I didn’t know what they were.”

Dendy ended his tenure as CEO of GTSI, by then a billion-dollar company, in 2006. He wasn’t interested in returning to the public world or big corporations.

Instead, he wanted to find useful places for capital to be put to work. “I’ve been bumping around town ever since, looking for opportunity, working with entrepreneurs and other interesting people, and putting capital to work on a constructive basis,” he explains.

“Some of those investments have been successful, and others less so, but that’s just what it is to operate in the arena. My definition of happiness is to be involved and constantly feeling the edges of the envelope, so that’s what I do. I want to know where those edges are, what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, how I can improve, and how I can press the limits. With that goal in mind, McLean Capital allows me to work with CEOs who need the help, and to lend some value.”

Today, McLean’s typical investment ranges from a few hundred thousand dollars to six million, with an expertise in government IT, but a close eye on opportunities in other fields as well. Dendy spends time with each one of the CEOs he has invested in, understanding that each has a unique story to tell. He came across one such unique story in 2011, when a friend, Alan Merten, the past President of George Mason University, arranged for him to tour their Prince William Campus. On that tour, he met two professors who are world experts in the field of proteomics, the study of proteins within cells. “I learned that scientists can now tell which proteins are active in a cell and which chemo drugs will work for a particular cancer patient,” Dendy explains. “Currently, oncologists follow a prescribed formula of treatment,

using statistical probabilities to select one type of chemo and then another to find what works. But each round of chemo costs between $30 and $100 thousand, which doesn’t even compare to the pain and suffering it incurs in the patient and their loved ones. Through the use of proteomics, we can tell which chemo a particular patient will respond to. ” Changing the way oncologists approach cancer treatment will be an extremely long and arduous journey, riddled with challenges left and right. Dendy began meeting with the scientists once a week for several months, developing messaging strategies and a business plan and ultimately co-founding Personalized Cancer Therapy, Inc. in 2012. By the end of 2012, the company began serving its first patients.

Looking toward the future and the work ahead, Dendy remains just as committed as ever to his top priority—his family. “My wife, Andrea, has been an absolutely critical component to my success because not only is she smart and constructive, she was willing to trust me,” he explains. “She always encouraged me not to wait, but to pursue my dreams immediately. For the first few years after starting my first company, we worked shoulder to shoulder. She would do anything that needed doing, including the heavy lifting of proposal writing, and she developed wonderful, close relationships with government contracting officers.

She really stepped up and helped me make it happen.”

Having raised four talented children, the Youngs are just beginning to enjoy grand–parenthood. By working tirelessly for the sake of their ideals, they have taught their children to get into the arena and get covered in dust, sweat, and blood of their own.

In advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world today, Dendy recommends they learn from action, not observation. “Jump into the deep end and swim like hell,” he says. “Get in the arena, because if you’re not, you don’t know where reality is. It’s the people who are doing it, and learning from the raw experience, that matter. Focus on revenue, because if you have that, everything else can take care of itself.

It’s all about getting that revenue stream, because that means you have customers, a product, and a basis for existence. Then it’s just a question of how much revenue, and of how you control your expenses.” Indeed, to know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and the high achievements in life, there is only one place to be: in the arena.

Dendy Young

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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 Emanual 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 riderless 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.”

From Gifford to Hickman

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“I questioned God, ‘Why MY child? Why do I have to lose?’

I imagined His response would be ‘If not your child, then whose?’

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.

© 2014 Gloria J. Bernhardt. All Rights Reserved.

Reprinted by permission.

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