Named in $5 Billion in Government Contract

By Mark R. Smith



A defense contractor getting a healthy cut of a $5 billion (yes, billion) deal will certainly raise a few eyebrows — as well as give company executives ample reason to dream of mushrooming profits and accelerated expansion plans.

Management of two area veteran-owned, service-disabled companies, Vision Technologies of Glen Burnie and FTData of Laurel, have such dreams, as they are among 44 companies nationwide to have been awarded lead contractor status on a Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC).

While being part of the agreement is not a promise of any concrete deals, it does mean that the winning contractors will be playing on a much smaller field as they place bids on often lucrative government contracts during the next five years.



The Quick Route

John Shetrone, a self-described "vetrepreneur," is the president and CEO of Vision Technologies, which he founded in June 2000

and hopes to take national. The company has grown to more than $25 million in revenues by focusing on IT services, project management and collocation for shared data facilities customers like The Discovery Channel, eBay, IBM, MedStar Health and Level 3 Communications.

Segueing into the government world where Vision has worked with the likes of the Department of Homeland Security, DOD and NIH, Shetrone said that, two years ago, Vision was "among 600 companies that bid on the GWAC," which is a President Bush-mandated executive order (13360) that calls for 3% of all federal spending to go through a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business.

Next, both companies were named among the 44 selected to provide services in two functional areas: The first encompassed systems operations, the other the design and the engineering of those systems.

The new deal is also referred to as a $5 billion Indefinite Deliver Indefinite Quantity contract, "which means that the government can order any IT service at any point of the five-year contract length," said Shetrone (a co-founder of the Apex Group in Columbia in 1987, which eventually sold out to ADC Telecommunications for $30 million), "so it could potentially be a 10-year program."

Therefore, that $5 billion ceiling could have "dozens of contracts under it. It is really what a contractor might call a 'hunting license,'" which means that "we can go to any contracting officer in any agency and offer our services, such as network administration and wireless technology," he said, "but present an avenue for condensed procurement [with the ability to sign a contract in 14 days], instead of taking the long, winding road."

What the GWAC basically does, said Karen Sobieski, vice president with FTData, "is give small disabled american veteran-owned companies like ours an opportunity to be a prime contractor.

"Otherwise, we would have to function as a subcontractor," Sobieski said of the 8-year-old company, which posted revenues of $6 million last year. "That's very reactive, because you have to wait for prime contractors to offer you business, and don't get the face time to develop relationships with the government customers [unless it is at the grace of the prime contractor].

"As a prime, you basically control your destiny," she said. "So the good thing about this GWAC is that it includes small businesses, which typically don't get to be a prime because they may be perceived as too small to handle the work and as more of a financial risk to a government customer."



Team Building

That underscores the importance of having a contract vehicle like the GWAC. "That appeals to the government if they want to work with you," Sobieski said.

FTData originally submitted a bid that included 19 other companies as team members in its original submission two years ago, though some been sold, merged, etc., since. "But since we won an award, we are allowed to add to our teams," she said. "When you're part of a 20-company team, you have a lot of backup. So we brought a group of companies to the table to make the offer."

Another reason the teams are so big is because the GWAC calls for disciplines from mainframe support to virtual data centers to nanotechnology, "so none of the 44 winning companies (in both functional areas) could work in all of them. Even a large prime like Lockheed Martin would struggle to do that."

Gloria Berthold, president of TargetGov in Elkridge, a provider of tools that help contractors make connections to the people within federal, state and local governments, said both companies have "done a remarkable job in that they each represented teams of contractors nationwide in winning this opportunity to bid."

Reiterating that the wins do not necessarily mean guaranteed business, Berthold said that the market for both companies is now "much smaller because they won't have to bid against thousands of other contractors."



Net Results

Berthold was especially impressed by the effort the team at Vision Technologies made to win part of the $5 billion GWAC. "They have a much better opportunity to grow their business very rapidly with this 'hunting license,'" she said. "They have also set themselves apart in that they proactively market themselves. That is a rarity in the world of government contracting."

To illustrate her point, she simply clicked on to Google. "If you type in 'Vets GWAC,' Vision's name comes up first (as the top item in the blue-shaded box) at the top of the page.

Indeed, the company went so far as to purchase the domain name, www.vets-gsa.com, to show their support. "In doing so," Berthold said, "they have positioned themselves to be recognized as the 'go to' company for this level of contracts."