WashingtonExec Series: Want To Be GovCon Executive Of The Year?
The finalists for this year’s Greater Washington Government Contractor Awards were announced last month, and as promised, WashingtonExec is bringing you its annual series with GovCon Award nominees all this month before the winners are unveiled November 1.
The winners will be announced at the annual gala at Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., and the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, Professional Services Council (PSC) and Washington Technology magazine will present the awards. With over 1,300 business and public sector leaders attending the event, our series will keep you up to date with all the finalists for this year–who they are, what they do, and why they are worthy of winning.
Today’s series presents Berico Technologies, nominated for “Contractor of the Year” in the under $25 million division, and our chat is with company President, Marybeth Wootton.
WashingtonExec: How do you differentiate your company from its competitors? What is unique about your approach?
Marybeth Wootton: We seek to innovate rather than follow trends. Many companies claim to be “Cloud” or “Big Data” companies. We have been delivering Cloud-based analytic tools since our inception in 2006. As evidence, Berico is the first “Authorized Service Provider” for Cloudera in the Federal Sector. This distinction differentiates from those following trends.
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Berico truly specializes in developing solutions to optimize government Cloud infrastructures such as Hadoop and Hbase. We also leverage the latest open source frameworks and technologies to create solutions that don’t require expensive licenses and on-going maintenance fees. We have created an innovative business strategy as a services provider of open source solutions – responsive to growing government desire to reduce total cost of ownership and enable collaboration and intra-agency sharing of technology.
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For example, Berico developed a high-performance event bus, Introspex, and has implemented it for two DoD customers with significant savings for each due to shared development costs. Introspex creates a comprehensive platform that acts as a stable, secure foundation for all other applications, clients, and services. This foundation untangles the “rat’s nest” of typical IT infrastructures, eliminates single points of failure within a system, and provides the universal ability for applications to communicate with each other in soft-real time while in a secure environment. Its open source foundation allows dynamic scalability and use across multiple agencies without licensing implications.
Our level of passion for supporting our customers’ Mission. While a “user-centric” philosophy is not novel, Berico focuses on the end-user experience at every phase of our development process. Berico integrates our experienced analysts and operators into the Agile development process to build solutions that have the highest operational impact for our customers. By bringing experienced analysts to each of our programs who have served in our customers’ environment as a user, Berico empowers analysts and operators with tools that were designed by a team that truly understands their requirements.
WashingtonExec: How have you grown the company as the government asks the private sector to “do more with less?”
Marybeth Wootton: We recognize that business growth is one of the many challenges that companies face in any given year, and that it’s been especially challenging over the last few years due to the overall economy and the specific issues that the government contracting industry is dealing with. Not only has Berico had to deal with economic and industry challenges, but we also had to overcome 2 major spinouts in 2011 that represented over 50% of our 2011 baseline. Fortunately we recognized and planned for the impact of the spinouts, and we set a plan and strategy that would ultimately lead us to another year of 50% or better growth from our January baseline.
As a result of a very detailed planning and analysis cycle, we were able to identify a growth plan that consisted of new pipeline opportunities, expansion on existing programs, and organic growth within key targeted customer accounts. Although we did grow our revenue base from each of the named areas above, a larger percentage of our 2012 growth has been driven by core organic opportunities. Much of our organic growth resulted from unsolicited white papers written by our technical leadership staff, and successful delivery and execution of open source technologies to our customers. We believe that our core strategy of embracing open source technologies and the cloud is a way for government customers to “do more with less”, and that this strategy positions us well for consistent sustainable growth in the future.
WashingtonExec: What is the fastest growing component of your business?
Marybeth Wootton: Due to Berico’s unique business model, which integrates our experienced analysts and our talented engineers to build solutions that have the highest operational impact, we often experience a healthy overlap between our two primary business segments, so we view overall top line growth as a more meaningful metric than individual segment growth.
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Given the current fiscal environment, the government’s intent on doing more with less, and the aforementioned overlap between our business segments, it comes as no surprise that our systems and software engineering and development services represent the fastest growth areas for Berico.
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The Government has consistently demonstrated its appetite for decreasing costs, adopting the newest technologies, and increasing its usage of open source technologies and frameworks in the cloud. This behavior and adoption pattern has led to more demand for our systems and software engineering services, and will likely lead to an increase in demand for the same as more Government agencies move to the cloud and using open source technologies.
WashingtonExec: Obtaining top talent in government contracting is fierce -how is your company able to not only recruit top talent, but also retain it?
Marybeth Wootton: Obtaining and retaining top talent is a strategic focus of ours. At Berico we pride ourselves on our ability to provide innovative solutions to help address our customers’ hardest problems. We understand that we can’t hope to solve these problems and address these challenges without talented people who are leaders in their respective fields. We’ve understood this from the start. Our founders started with a business model that focused on attracting top talent and we have not deviated from it. This strategy has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy; talented people want to work on tough problems, they solve tough problems and clients return with more challenges with the confidence that we can help them succeed. Fundamentally, talented people want to work alongside other talented folks.
The Berico culture values excellence and our team members seek out opportunities to collaborate and create with other innovative people. Some of the best feedback we have from new hires relates that as candidates they were motivated to join the team because they were excited to work where people could creatively and constructively challenge each other and in turn develop innovative solutions. The results show that the strategy has worked. Historically Berico has en a 95% retention rate and 86% of offers made to candidates are accepted. In 2011, 31% of our new hires came from referrals from current employees.
WashingtonExec: What is your corporate culture? How do you maintain satisfied employees?
Marybeth Wootton: Our corporate culture values innovation, excellence and dedication to the mission. From our founding Berico has sought out talented people who are creative thought-leaders in their respective fields. We have formed a team that is not satisfied with the status quo, they continually seek new and innovative solutions to difficult problems. We place significant value on talented collaborators. Berico differentiates between all-stars and rock-stars. While both refer to excellence; an all-star is a talented individual player, but a rock-star is a member of a band who values the contributions of the other artists (employees, partners and clients alike). After all, tough challenges are not solved by individuals, but by teams.
Maintaining this corporate culture is a challenge especially during periods of growth. Berico sees its culture as part of its strategy. Management focuses on culture and it is actively discussed at almost every leadership meeting. We know that culture is not something that can be taken for granted or ignored. Fortunately, the team feels the same way. Everyone recognizes how unique the Berico culture is and seeks to preserve it. One of our keys to success is to talk about culture openly – it has proven to engender an espirit de corps of its own.
WashingtonExec: How has the government contracting industry changed since you entered the sector?
Marybeth Wootton: The persistent budget pressures and looming sequestration have driven a major shift in the industry in the past two years. While as a small business, we have seen an increased amount of competition from large businesses pursuing smaller contracts than a few years ago, we also see greater opportunity to bring truly innovative solutions to our customers. The budget pressures have been and continue to be a “forcing function” for the Government to become more efficient. This has driven a greater willingness to adopt open source solutions and support for cross-agency sharing of solution investments. This move away from expensive and under-utilized “enterprise solutions” is a great opportunity for Berico. Our philosophy and business model has always been, do more for less. We believe that by doing so, we will be the trusted partner for our customers to deliver cost effective and truly innovative solutions. We believe that our growth in a time of declining budgets validates this strategy.
WashingtonExec: Does your company have a Bring Your Own Device Policy (BYOD)? What has been your largest challenge with this policy? How is the “mobile workforce” changing the way you conduct business within your company and with the federal government?
Marybeth Wootton: We don’t have a formalized policy that specifically addresses personal devices at work, but we do have policies and infrastructure to support it. We know that our employees are early adopters and are the sort of folks who want the latest and greatest gadgets (we are glad they are). So we don’t regulate personal devices at work as much as we facilitate it in a controlled way. Obviously, you don’t want all kinds of devices with different levels of security hitting the company’s network, but most personal devices need internet access. So we created dedicated, firewalled Wi-Fi networks specifically for personal devices (and those of external guests). If an employee wants to use their personal tablet or smart phone running the latest OS they are more than welcome to, so long as they connect to the internet via the guest network. Of course we have other protections in place, but this is the key aspect of our position: allow use in an environment that does not threaten the security of the network. Feedback from team members on this arrangement has been very positive.
For Berico a mobile workforce is a more connected and collaborative workforce. With a culture that places so much value upon collaboration, mobile technologies have been extremely beneficial for us. We also have a fair amount of employees who work offsite with government clients. Technologies that offer employees the opportunity to remain connected to the Berico culture have proven to be valuable. We want everyone to be involved, connected and communicative so that all team members can take part of the culture that makes us unique. Employees everywhere are placing more and more value on healthy life-work balance (where life comes first). Berico understands this is pivotal to happy, fulfilled, creative employees. By enabling a mobile workforce, we are able to help team members find that balance and contribute in healthier more efficient and productive ways. This is not just a technology issue, it’s a social behavior challenge and we think we are on the right path.
WashingtonExec: How is your company involved in the community?
Marybeth Wootton: Berico’s leadership team dedicates considerable time and resources to non-profit organizations serving critical missions and community priorities. Berico’s owners have been involved in Wounded Warriors, Luke’s Wings, and the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia. Additionally, Berico’s founders recently instituted two new venues to support those who have served our country valiantly. The first is through the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) sponsorship of a mentoring and internship program to match Italian-American veterans with senior business mentors as they are leaving the military. The second is through founding the COMMIT Foundation dedicated to transitioning veterans into meaningful, long-term careers in business and technology.
Many of our managers support other community charities, and Berico is committed to affording them the flexibility and time to serve. For example, our VP Internal Operations serves on the Board of Directors for the U.S. STEM Foundation. Another senior manager is a leader of the non-profit Fashion Fights Poverty. Many team members participate in philanthropic activities that raise money and awareness for causes such as American Cancer Society, the Wounded Warrior Project, the Hero’s Fund, and the Susan G Komen Foundation. Next month Berico team members will be mentoring and volunteering at local technology events and competitions for K-12 students at the FIRST Robotics FLL Regional competition and the US STEM Off-Season Robotics Challenge.
In parallel to our philanthropic efforts, Berico is also proud to support industry and professional associations through participation, sponsorships, and Board leadership.
