SMALL BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
open vacancies and unhappy customers, which is self-defeating to mission success. We know we don’t and can’t control it, but in my opinion, it’s not a good busi- ness model for professional IT services, where innovation, quality of the solution and the expertise of the people matter. LPTA should be relegated to commod- ity purchases, where all specifications are equal.”
OFFSITE WORK FLEXIBILITY Eric Strauss is director of business develop- ment at Connected Logistics, a Huntsville, Alabama-based Service Disabled Veteran- Owned Small Business with 35 employees that provides logistics, systems engineer- ing and program support to DOD, the Army and other government contractors. “My recommendation would be focus less on counting butts in seats and more on
results and outcomes and how effectively the mission is being accomplished.”
Requiring contractors to work onsite— most of his clients are based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia—limits the available talent pool, he said. He admits he’s as guilty as anyone of wanting “to be able to see people in their seats as I walk down the hallway.” But “that fear and concern clouds our judgment and our ability to really focus sometimes on what’s most critical, which is not is that person working from my office from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., but at the end of the week, did they get done what they needed to get done to be successful?”
Roughly half of his company’s work is with the Army, the other half is with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). “I think it’s fair to say that DLA has been more forward-thinking in its approach to offsite work,” he said. One of the DLA projects requires a lot of travel to DLA sites in both the continental United States and abroad. Te Connected Logistics-led team on that contract is based in eight states across several time zones. “And it works great,” Strauss said.
“We couldn’t have gotten to that point had DLA said we need everyone to be within 50 miles of Fort Belvoir,” he said. “And that gave Connected Logistics and our teammates huge flexibility to recruit and hire and retain the most qualified person- nel for the job, not those individuals that happen to be either closest to Fort Belvoir or most willing to say, OK, I’ll spend an hour and 15 minutes in my car each day or each way traveling to and from Fort Belvoir.”
Eric Strauss
EXCESS, REPETITIVE PAPERWORK… Vantage’s Fisher finds the paperwork involved in working with DOD to be a challenge. “I think whatever could be
12 Army AL&T Magazine Fall 2020
done to allow the company to focus to the extent possible on innovation is, I think, best for both sides.”
Not only is there a lot of paperwork, but it’s often duplicating the same information on multiple forms, he said. “Occasionally, just the nature of working with a larger orga- nization like the Army, we find ourselves filling out the same information in multi- ple different formats, and there being a bit of documentation overhead that obviously we prefer to minimize. But we also under- stand that it’s a large organization and there’s a lot of complexity they’ve got to manage. I think it’s an adaptation process on both sides a little bit.”
His company is good at building drones, and that should be its focus, he said. “Our expertise and our skill set is not under- standing the details or the ins and outs how to navigate the Army’s organizational structure. So the more that we can get help in understanding how to navigate the organizational structure and how to work effectively, which the Army or other parts of DOD can be extremely helpful for us.”
…AND UNCERTAIN FUNDING For a tiny startup like Lumineye, funding is key. But they’ve learned that, in deal- ing with DOD, just because you’ve been awarded work doesn’t mean the check is in the mail.
“We spent the first two years boot- strapped,” Hennen said.
“We were
working full time on this [developing their through-wall sensing technology], but we were working odd jobs as well to be able to pay our bills. we were doing pitch compe- titions and stuff to get funding around the state and everywhere else so that we could pay for new prototypes.”
“And any of the additional funding, we were just trying to keep ourselves afloat;
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