Her mother had taught linguistics at a university in the former Soviet Union. In America, her first job was lifting boxes in a warehouse — she did what she could to make ends meet. Zhenia Klevitsky was young, but she was watching.
She saw her father learn English from scratch. Her parents rebuilt everything in a country that owed them nothing. She grew up in refugee camps and Section 8 housing, and what she took from all of it doesn’t show up on a resume: Difficult situations don’t ask permission, and neither should you.
“Going through hardships in life just makes how you work and lead feel different — it changes your perspective,” Klevitsky says. “You know how to deal with difficult situations. You take them head on.”
Twenty-five years later, she’s the chief growth officer at ITC Federal, a government technology contractor helping government agencies make faster decisions in matters of national security.
Finding Her Way In
Klevitsky grew up wanting to be a psychologist. She loved the psyche of people, she says, and college only deepened that. Then came the crossroad: pursue a Ph.D. — another decade of school — or pivot to an MBA and get into the field faster. She chose the MBA at American University’s Kogod School of Business, and while she was there, landed an internship at LMI. She never left GovCon.
“I haven’t gotten my dream job in terms of being a therapist, but I use psychology every single day,” Klevitsky says. “I deal with people on so many different levels.”
From LMI, she moved through Booz Allen Hamilton, BearingPoint, PwC/Guidehouse, building out business development practices before stepping into chief growth officer roles. She has been at ITC Federal since May 2025.
Twenty-five years in, Klevitsky is skeptical of the tidy narrative that GovCon careers are built on being in the right room at the right time. Relationships matter once you’re established — she’ll grant you that — but she’s clear they didn’t get her in the door.
“I have never gotten a job in my entire career based on who I knew — ever,” she says. “You have to prove yourself every single day.”
One misconception Klevitsky wants to dismantle is that there’s a playbook for any of this, especially for her role.
“The CGO playbook — there’s no such thing,” she says.
Blood, Sweat and the Deals that Got Away
Klevitsky leads growth, which means she lives in the space between strategy and outcome, where you can execute perfectly and still lose. She’s direct about what that costs.
“You can still have won even if we lost the deal if you’ve done everything right,” Klevitsky tells her team.
It’s a harder sell than it sounds. Business development runs on wins, and losses sting in proportion to how much went into them — months of customer meetings, a capture strategy, a proposal that came together exactly how it was supposed to. She doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“It’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and late nights,” Klevitsky says. “It takes a village.”
Not every win shows up in revenue. ITC Federal was recently awarded a Financial Management QSMO designation on its GSA schedule, a process evaluated by both General Services Administration and the Treasury Department in a competitive pool she describes as unusually tight.
“It’s not generating revenue on its own,” Klevitsky says. “It’s another mechanism to win work.”
But what it does is shrink the competition. Fewer companies hold the designation, which means fewer competitors at the table when the work comes.
“We won it, and that is huge,” she says. “I’m super excited about that.”
The Velvet Hammer
Klevitsky has a nickname someone she worked with gave her: velvet hammer. She’s hard charging and expects the same from everyone around her. She leads by example rather than directive, and she’s explicit that example-setting has nothing to do with micromanagement.
“Not from the micromanagement perspective,” Klevitsky says, “but they’ll learn that way.”
She’s also genuinely open to what the most junior person in the room might know that she doesn’t. Recently, one of her staff walked her through a new way to use AI for pricing she hadn’t considered.
“He’s coaching me,” Klevitsky says. “I’m learning.”
Direct and fair, that’s how her team would describe her. Transparent in a way she knows not everyone can handle. Black and white, no reading between the lines, whether the news is good or bad. Mistakes don’t rattle her. People do things wrong; you fix it and move on.
What she won’t work through is someone who’s stopped trying. That’s the hammer under the velvet — and it’s non-negotiable.
“If I see that you’re just not trying, it’s not going to work out,” she says.
Where the Industry is Heading
On federal IT, Klevitsky is unambiguous: Everyone is talking about AI, and far fewer are actually deploying it in any meaningful way.
“There’s a bunch of LLMs and everyone is running pilots and prototypes,” she says. “But a lot of the models aren’t really deployed in production environments, and the outputs aren’t really explainable.”
ITC Federal is trying to close that gap with AI embedded into mission workflows, tested against real operational conditions and tied to decisions with real consequences.
“Whatever we do, we’re tying it back to the mission,” Klevitsky says. “It has to work.”
Data is the older, harder problem underneath all of it. Agencies have decades of accumulated information and not nearly enough infrastructure to make sense of it. AI raises the stakes on getting that right rather than resolving it.
“Making sense of the data they have and being able to utilize it effectively, that has been a challenge since the beginning of time,” Klevitsky says. “And it continues to be.”
Budget is the immediate pressure. Between DOGE, government shutdowns and funds moving across agencies, her customers are navigating unprecedented uncertainty.
But what Klevitsky is really tracking is acquisition. Requests for information are being used for down-selects now, meaning if you don’t respond, you never see the solicitation. The Federal Acquisition Regulation is being overhauled. Companies that aren’t tracking those changes will miss opportunities before they know they existed.
“If folks are not keeping in touch with the changes in the market from an acquisition perspective, they’re going to fall behind,” Klevitsky says.
Outside the Office
Away from work, Klevitsky’s time belongs mostly to her two kids, 8 and 13, both swimmers. Klevitsky herself swam competitively and still gets on deck for her kids’ meets.
“If I could win the lottery, I would buy a swim team and just focus on that,” she says.
The other hobby is cave diving, which she hasn’t done in a while but is getting back to.
What drives her is fear of failure. Klevitsky is a self-described perfectionist who wants everything — at work and at home — to be as good as it can be.
“I wake up every day thinking about what we have to do, what we have to accomplish,” she says. “I cannot fail.”
It’s the same current that ran through Klevitsky’s parents’ lives. She was too young to understand it then. Her mother unpacked a new country with the same precision she’d once brought to teaching language. Her father learned English word by word. Nobody told them how.
A quarter century in an industry that supports the country that took her family in. Klevitsky doesn’t dress it up.
“It makes me feel like I’m giving back to the country that brought me in,” she says.
The work, for her, is never just the work.