IT’S ALL IN THE DELIVERY
contracting authority—who are actually responsible for the execution. Tey are GEN Dennis Via at Army Materiel Com- mand; LTG Tomas Bostick at the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers [USACE]; Monte Kapec at Army Medical Com- mand; Harry Hallock at the Intelligence [and Security] Command at Fort Belvoir; and GEN Frank Grass at the National Guard Bureau contracting centers, which is a joint operation that the Army’s respon- sible for. Tose are our five major buying commands for everything that the Army does. (See Figure 2, Page 20.)
And so we work together as a team on what the goals ought to be. When we get the OSD goals, we then look at what OSD has asked us to do. And if there has to be some adjustment, that’s done in a teaming effort with the commands— nothing dictated from here like, “Hey, you owe me 20 percent,” because we [OSBP] don’t write any contracts. We don’t own any requirements in this office. Tat’s all out in the field, based on mis- sion requirements.
Army AL&T: So you’re the middleman, in a sense, or you’re the broker? How would you put it?
Marks: I’m the Army’s lead advocate for small business. And so on behalf of the
secretary, I’m the guy who talks to our commands and to DOD about what the Army will do, based on what our com- mands are able to bring to the table.
Army AL&T: How do the linkages work between all of the small business programs and your office and the other Army small business offices, such as the ones at AMC, the Army Corps of Engi- neers and many other major commands?
Marks: Te Army is all about chains of command, right? And so, having been raised in a chain-of-command environ- ment, it wasn’t too tough for me to tie together, you know, who does what to whom and who’s responsible for what on the linkages. So the Small Business Administration, at the federal level, is responsible on behalf of [the president for] everything to do with small business. SBA has assigned DOD a small business utilization goal of 23 percent for the past few years. DOD, in turn, assigns small business goals to the services based on this goal as well as other facts. We, in turn, assign goals to the commands based on the methodology I described earlier. We then work with the small business offices at these commands to provide them with the guidance and support they need to achieve their goals.
Army AL&T: Te Army has succeeded in making its goals for a long time. What makes the Army different from the other services, which didn’t make their goals until recently?
Marks: I think what made the Army different was the command emphasis on the role that small businesses play in the overall picture of the Army’s industrial base. With that emphasis, the whole team pulled together to ensure that we had the right mix. Tere’s no magic formula to that, but you’ve got to have large and small businesses to make a good indus- trial base. And where most of the ideas come from—and I think even in Gansler [“Unintended Outcomes of Small Business Legislation and Policy: Oppor- tunities for Improvement”], they will tell you this—small business is where a lot of those up-and-coming ideas, especially in technology, come from now. A lot of those small businesses start small, but they do what? Tey grow based on the rules, they end up growing themselves. But that’s just the nature of the business.
Army AL&T: Do you find that there are small businesses that do one thing really well and just stick to that thing?
It’s not that we just give contracts to them. What we do is ensure that those small businesses with the right capabilities, that can support our mission requirements, get a fair shot at providing their products and services to the Army.
18 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2016
Marks: Well, I think we find a variety, actually, across the spectrum. Tere are those guys that when they went into it, they knew this is what they want to do, and they’re satisfied with that and they perfect that. So that’s where they stay. Ten there are those that are really into growing their companies, and eventually, a lot of those grow not to be a large busi- ness, but they grow out of being small. You hear
them talking about how it’s
hard for them to compete against the very large businesses of the world, because, at this point, they can’t compete against the small businesses. So we’re starting to get a lot of that. But again, that’s all a good
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