Retired Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick joined SOS International in 2012 after a distinguished 36-year Army career. He served as commanding general of America’s only Airborne Corps — the XVIII Airborne Corps — and the nation’s largest military installation, Fort Bragg.
As senior vice president for SOSi’s mission solutions, he is focused on supporting long-range logistics, training, and expeditionary medical support. We talked with Helmick about the challenges facing a large family-owned GovCon, and about the ways in which his military experience is helping SOSi stake a claim in the competitive military-logistics space.
What’s your role at SOSi?
We’re one of the largest family-owned U.S. government service contractors. I run our logistics portfolio and provide facility operations, maintenance and professional services for the Department of Defense and the Department of State. It is one of three business units within SOSi. The others provide cybersecurity services, software development, linguistics and analytical support for federal agencies, defense customers and the U.S. intelligence community.
My focus is on bringing revenue into the company and growing our business.
How does your military experience factor in?
The military taught me how important it is to be consistent, regardless of what you’re doing and the circumstances you face. It’s about consistency over the long haul. You can be the best vice president for 6 months or 12 months. But how will you be in 36 months, 72 months?
The way to drive consistency is to hire good people. Hire people that fill the gaps where you don’t have personal strengths. You can do anything with good people, but that means you have to judge people fairly quickly in an interview and do some vetting on your own to make sure you got the right person for the right job at the right time at the right location.
You’ve also got to look forward to the challenges and not back on your successes. You always have to look out the windshield rather than looking in the rearview mirror.
What are some of the challenges to delivering logistics services, especially in conflict areas?
We like to go fish where other people don’t want to fish — that’s where the opportunities are. But that’s also where a lot of risks are. The No. 1 risk is security.
We just completed a large U.S. government contract in Iraq. We had that contract for close to 7 years, and during that period, we had everything thrown at us but the kitchen sink. In March of 2020, we had over 50 rockets fall into the location we provided services.
By having the right employees on the ground and the right processes in place, we could quickly adapt to this crisis and coordinate vital repairs to critical infrastructure and equipment to keep the mission moving forward.
How can a GovCon operate effectively in that environment?
It is very, very important to have the right processes and procedures in place. When operating internationally, a business must comply with both U.S. and host nation laws. So, in addition to focusing on program execution, your organization must have policies in place to navigate things like international labor laws and work permits, as well as emergency visas and foreign tax laws.
You also need an agile workforce that can adapt to challenges, and an experienced leadership team that is engaged and decisive. Things can move quickly and change quickly in an operational environment, so our leaders need to be informed and prepared to make difficult decisions quickly.
In our company, our corporate leadership actually goes to these remote locations to speak to our employees and make sure those in-country have everything they need to prosecute the mission. For example, our CEO, chief operations officer, chief human resources officer and chief financial officer have traveled to meet with our employees in remote areas like Iraq. That personal touch is something our employees and customers appreciate. It sets us apart from other organizations.
How can a GovCon best cope with the complexities in such areas?
No individual or contractor has all the answers to every problem. Those who do it best are the ones that demonstrate agility and adapt quickly.
For example, when the global pandemic popped up, we had to make significant changes to our operations. We had to implement social distancing guidelines, adjust project schedules and sort through many supply-chain challenges.
The most significant priority was taking care of our people on the ground in countries like Iraq. We worked with medical professionals to put in new protocols and tapped our own corporate global logistics capabilities to procure personal protective equipment and COVID-19 antibody tests, and quickly delivered those to our employees in the field.
No one could do any of this alone. It takes excellent processes, smart people and engaged leadership — and I’m fortunate to have all three at SOSi.
You also talk about “winning versus competing.” What’s the distinction?
It’s easy to compete. Anyone can go out there and put something on a piece of paper and submit it. It is much harder to win.
Our goal is to be one of the top five U.S. government contractors in the services space. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re moving in that direction.
To win, you must do your homework. You have to know your competition. You have to recognize the strengths of your company. You must identify what will make you stand out as best of class for any opportunity you pursue. We know our strengths, and we also know how and when to team with other companies that would make us stronger.
We also strive to leverage the capabilities of the other SOSi business units. For example, our company has an incredible suite of big data analytics software and artificial intelligence-enabled tools that we are leveraging to enhance our logistics operations. These tools will help us implement smart technologies into our facilities to improve our services and develop predictive maintenance schedules to minimize downtime.
Where do you see opportunity for growth?
For my business unit, the opportunity is in the Pacific region. We have an extensive intel and cyber business footprint there now, and we think we could build on that to pursue logistics opportunities. We have excellent relationships with clients in the Navy, the Army and the Air Force. We want to understand the requirements they have in the logistics arena and continue leveraging and building on those relationships.
What makes this work personally satisfying?
For me, it is the challenge. After being successful in the military, I wanted to know: Could I be successful in the private sector? I wanted to learn how to run a company, to understand how the CEO makes a decision. I am still learning, and I get energy from the people that surround me. They all have that same entrepreneurial attitude. We’re looking to uncover opportunities that nobody else is thinking about and develop a commonsense solution that actually works. That’s what we do.