Interview transcript
Terry Gerton Let’s start with talking about Hive. You’ve positioned yourself really as a disrupter in the federal contracting space. Are there specific technology or process innovations that have helped you most transform your organization?
Will Fortier Well, I think that that’s something that every organization is going through at this moment and time. I think some of the enablers that we’ve certainly benefited from would be the cloud service providers. That has completely revolutionized how we interact with our solutions. When I entered the GovCon space, we were still on print and file servers and version control was a huge issue and Just moving towards collaborative tools like Google suites and Microsoft Teams has allowed us to actually collaborate on the artifacts that we’re building for our clients and communicate. Could you imagine going through a pandemic without those cloud service providers? That has been a big game changer for us in how we affect our clients’ missions. But what we’ve been focusing on are things like improving decision support systems across our clients’ platforms, enabling them to just — getting the right information into the decision-makers hands and enabling that decision-making process much faster and much more efficient. Trying to take out errors, trying to increase automation and reliability of that data.
Terry Gerton Do you find that your innovations are driven more by your client demands or by Hive anticipating what they will want?
Will Fortier Yeah, I think it’s always a mixture of both. I think that just in our name itself, Hive Group, we’ve got a lot — our people are in the field, our labs are in field, we’re responding to client demand. But we also have this collection of subject matter expertise in house. All of our leadership are practitioners in the industry, meaning they’ve delivered solutions to clients themselves. And so when we’re brought into discussion, with our teams on the delivery side, what we end up doing is synthesizing what they’re doing and then using our experience to then pull that information in-house and try to build something on top of that that might be useful to the clients, might give some benefit. And not only that, but sharing from what we’re doing on one client engagement on other client engagements as well. So we’ve developed things like Hexacore, which is a delivery excellence framework that we employ in all our delivery teams. And then HiveIQ, as well, as something else that we’ve instituted, which is really information sharing and getting best practices from what one team is doing into another team’s skillset.
Terry Gerton You started to talk about some of your specific products there. It’s a crowded federal contracting space. How do you use those kinds of products and other techniques or strategies to differentiate Hive?
Will Fortier Yeah, that’s interesting. So there’s been a lot of innovation in this space, and certainly there’s been a lot a top-down pressure, which is really making it — a lot of people taking stabs at trying to innovate. Whether we’re building the tools themselves, or we’re developing partnerships with those that actually have really good tools as well, it’s a mixture between both of those sides of the coin. A lot of what we do is focused around the reinvestment of what were doing. I mean, we’ve had a quick and fast growth trajectory since the start of the company. And so what we’re doing is taking that money and it’s allowing us to reinvest into what we’re able to offer as far as our solutions to our clients. That allows us to also get deeper and specialize in some of those areas that we’re focusing on.
Terry Gerton You talked about that rapid scaling and growth. Are there any particular critical decisions that have enabled you to scale without losing your quality control?
Will Fortier Yes, scaling. That is something that, as a practitioner in the field, I think a lot of us don’t really get faced with those kinds of questions until you’re either in the C-suite or in the ownership seat, yourself. And so what we do, I think it’s kind of two-part. One is internal, it’s making sure that the right people are in the right seats on the bus. Because what got you to 50 people isn’t necessarily the same configuration that’s gonna work when you’re scaling up to 200. And so you gotta keep that in mind. And that’s something that you learn when you are actually sitting in that seat. And then the next is externally. I think that looking at your support providers is a real game changer and getting the right support providers can be a real force multiplier. And making those mistakes can also cost you a lot of effort and time down the road. And there’s certainly some examples of that, one would be getting good advice. Not surprising to anybody, but having good legal advice is a really obvious thing to have, but one that kind of caught me by surprise was banking relationships. And so, when you start out a company, whoever will give you a line of credit and some treasury is usually who you end up starting with. But as you start to scale up, your needs do change. And so I remember our CFO, Ryan Fuller, came to me and said, hey, I think it’s time that we kind of look at some other options, got into that, got into the why. We ended up going with JP Morgan Chase. Once we did that, I really started realizing how important banking relationships are. Bringing people, hearing from the SMEs on what direction the market is going, getting to meet with other business owners and sort of collaborating with them on what they’re going through — all those kinds of, those offerings that the right support provider can provide is just, it certainly has affected who we are as a business and how we operate.
Terry Gerton That is such important insight, and it sounds like a lesson learned maybe the hard way through experience.
Will Fortier Yeah, you can start your QuickBooks as a great tool, probably not going to get you to, it’s probably not something you want to scale on. But yeah, I mean the tools that you start out with are great and they certainly have a place, but the partnerships, they need to evolve along with how you scale.
Terry Gerton You also mentioned the importance of having the right people in the right seats on the bus, everybody’s favorite leadership analogy. But what are your tricks of the trade in terms of making sure that you have the right people in those right seats, especially in cleared positions, and how do you maintain culture as you’re growing your organization?
Will Fortier The culture question is, we could spend an hour on that alone and that has certainly faced some challenges with COVID and the separation of a lot of folks going remote. But when it comes to talent retention, I think it’s one of the most important things that we’ve focused on. It’s important not to just drop your team member off at a client’s site and say good luck. When our employees look around, what we focus on is putting an emphasis around lifting our people. This is actually one of our core pillars as an organization. And in doing that, we try to focus and work with our client sets on finding opportunities for people to have a growth path. And when we do that, it’s more than just a sales pitch. I mean, the employees that are coming in can take a quick look around and see some folks who might have joined our organization at an entry level and are now a part of the leadership team. Finding those kinds of candidates is certainly what we strive for, and that’s the kind of culture that we want to build and support. Then really a part the secret sauce is how you hire, which is very different depending on the organizations that you go to. I think that what we try to focus on is more the total picture. I mean, some bigger mistakes that we see both on the government side as well as the industry side is making a hiring decision just because the person has done the work, similar work before, instead of focusing on the culture fit: is this person professionally curious? Are they gonna emulate the qualities and the core values that you’re trying to establish throughout the organization? And look, nobody bats a thousand in doing that, but it is something that we consciously try to keep in mind when we’re building out our team.
Terry Gerton So we’ve talked a little bit about what makes Hive different, your scaling strategy or your workforce strategy, but there’s a lot that’s changing in the GovCon space right now. So if you’re looking forward five years, how do you think Hive will change to continue to be competitive in the market?
Will Fortier Yeah, so to say that things are changing right now doesn’t feel like a strong enough phrase. But one of the things that we want to focus on, and we could go on about all the different kinds of capabilities that we’re trying to implement for clients, but one that’s near and dear to my heart is certainly the acquisition process. You’re seeing a lot in that discussion nowadays, and certainly with the revolutionary FAR overhaul, you’re seeing lot of recommended change for how the government goes about procuring things. So I think that there’s a lot of discussion that needs to happen, and there’s certainly a lot of innovation that we can work towards. In that realm, one of the things that we’ve started at Hive Group is the Industry Partner Council, and that is a collection of really the big 20, and altogether there’s 200 businesses all throughout the GovCon space that are in varying degrees participating, and what we’re aimed to do is really just strengthening that conversation between contracting activities and industry, and trying to find ways to educate each other, you know, break down those barriers, get us talking more, and there’s certainly, with as much change that is going on right now, we’ve got to also keep those avenues to talk and discuss what’s working and what’s not working. So that’s one avenue that we’re hoping continues to stick and certainly getting more contracting activities on board with it.
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