Chip Dirth
Pricing Director, National Security Solutions, KBR
Chip Dirth is director of pricing for KBR’s National Security Solutions business, which has over 3,600 employees delivering mission engineering, digital integration, rapid solutioning, analytics and programmatic support to the Defense Department, intelligence community and other government agencies. He brings over 20 years of experience in pricing team management, pricing strategy and price-to-win analysis.
Dirth recently guided his team through a business unit restructure and a strategic acquisition that doubled the size of his pricing team and significantly expanded the proposal pipeline. During this period of transition and growth, he managed the development of more than 200 pricing actions, resulting in over $1.4 billion in new contract awards. He also participated in the company’s cost estimating system audit, which earned an approved status.
When Dirth joined KBR in 2022, he took on the challenge of building a pricing team from the ground up to support the company’s newest business unit. Within a year, he assembled a group of high-performing analysts and worked with business unit leaders to establish processes that optimized his team’s support for the organization, said KBR Vice President of Strategic Pricing Justin Pudloski.
“Having met the first challenge, we’re now leveraging Chip’s experience with integrating new businesses and pricing strategy to ensure the business unit has consistent revenue and margin growth,” Pudloski added.
Why Watch
Dirth’s team will focus on boosting win rates for every proposal. In 2025, the NSS pricing team plans to train business development and operations leaders on pricing strategy and price-to-win analysis, showing how these tools drive results in a fast-changing government acquisition environment.
Dirth said government contract pricing is always exciting and evolving. He noted he has led pricing organizations across several administrations with shifting acquisition and budget priorities, from true best-value environments to those trending toward Lowest Price Technically Acceptable awards.
“I look forward to sharing my experience and creating new tools and processes that will support NSS’ growth objectives,” he said. “Most important will be building the capabilities of my team and ensuring we build strong relationships across both functional support and business staff as pricing will always be a team sport.”
Fun fact: Dirth’s career began in pricing for USAID contracts, which took him to India, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Argentina. He found Argentina especially rewarding, as he speaks near-fluent Spanish and studied in both northern and southern Spain before moving to Washington, D.C.