Success comes in many forms — meeting financial goals, retaining quality employees and building a strong, self-sufficient company culture. NuAxis Innovations embodies all of these characteristics, and its team has been its driving force since the beginning.
In November 2016, the company earned recognition for its success as one of 2016 Deloitte Fast 500, which recognizes the fastest-growing technology, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America. Between 2012-2015, NuAxis’ percentage fiscal-year revenue grew a staggering 134 percent. Inc. 5000 also included the federal IT services contractor on its list of the country’s fastest-growing privately held companies, at No. 2,641.
Despite these recognitions, CEO Imran Akram, who founded the company in 2002 alongside his wife, said: “If I’m proud of something, it’s our people. It’s all about people at NuAxis, and not about just our people within the company, but also the people we work for.”
Commitment to Service Delivery
The basis of NuAxis’ success comes from its commitment to quality service delivery, to both customers and employees. NuAxis focuses on supporting an employee-focused culture. The service NuAxis delivers continues to move the company to new levels by investing in its people and building a culture of which they can be proud.
“Our culture is very egalitarian and flat,” Akram said. “We have fun as we work.”
To foster this sense of fun and camaraderie, the company uses a modern office setting with cubicles rather than offices, lower partitions to encourage interaction, and huddle rooms for team meetings. To encourage well being, the corporate office runs together twice a week after work, and employees also participate in virtual steps challenges.
“It’s very collegial with a mutual respect-oriented culture,” President Raza Latif said. “Everybody enjoys the interactions, which makes it much more fun to do the hard work that we do.”
Good Proposals, Good Solutions
Beyond building a service delivery-focused culture, NuAxis has positioned itself as a leader in the contract IT space with its attention to details and innovative solutions.
“We have been blessed with a team that has the ability to write good proposals, understand the customers and their opinions and translate that into really good, compelling solutions,” Latif said. “Our business continuity strategy has been to maximize our prime work, and that has been another contributor to the growth we have enjoyed over the past few years.
In addition to its thriving company culture, 99 percent of NuAxis’ revenue comes from prime contract work. In addition to having a stellar proposal writing team, Raza and Imran take a very “hands-on” approach to working with their customers to create innovative solutions to take their agency to the next level.
“Our sleeves are rolled up at all times, and that allows us to be more responsive and more agile,” Latif said.
“As we grow, we recognize that more process is needed to scale the model we have, but our challenge is to grow while keeping our culture intact,” Akram added.
While many of the employees provide customer service on customer sites, a challenge NuAxis faces includes how it allocates its available resources to meet customer needs
“We’re always recalibrating and retooling our resources,”Latif said. “When a customer has a unique requirements, we make executive decisions like hiring a more expensive resource so we can meet the customer’s needs. That is one of the reasons our customers like us because we think of finances as just one of the factors important to any decision, and our job is to make sure we are fully optimized when doing our business.”
Advancing Agile Development
The story of NuAxis Innovations’ Area 330 division shows how such recalibrating proved beneficial. Government contracting businesses gravitate toward two major focus areas: performing services and building products. To better serve its customers, NuAxis assigned a core group of its engineers to build a proprietary enterprise-level software product.
By creating this product in-house, the company learned how to build complex software using the agile development approach. Given its services focus, the team quickly oriented this capability to serve the growing need of federal agencies in the area of agile development.
Named after its suite number where the team had to move to accommodate its rapid growth, the Area 330 division is now leading the company into a new market within the federal IT arena. The growth happened as Area 330 won its first contract to serve the General Services Administration in its implementation of a high-profile pilot related to the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act.
“It’s a new initiative that is already successful in terms of getting traction with the customer,” Latif said. “Area 330 has walls that you can write on and standing desks. It’s an exciting development where we are building something which is in line with our culture and, more importantly, in line with what our customers are looking for.”
Related: WashingtonExec Hosts Executive Mixer, Sponsored by Sutherland Global Services and NuAxis Innovations
