We hired a director of security, Jackie Keith, to oversee that process. The Department of Homeland Security is heavily involved. We have to dig deeply into each linguist's personal and family history. We'll ask for addresses of all the places the person has lived, worked, and gone to school for the past 10 years. We'll ask for phone numbers and addresses of relatives and friends. We'll check into the person's financial and criminal history. Any blemish—an arrest, a bankruptcy, a bad check—can get a linguist disqualified, especially for positions that require secret and top-secret clearance.
I talk with Bruce Greene, our CFO, once or twice a day. He has been doing government contracts for 30 years. He does most of the costing—figuring out how much we would need to charge for, say, hiring 150 linguists and delivering them to a military base. Bruce lives nearby, so we meet once a week to go over the financials.
Bruce and I are always talking about how to improve the numbers. The answer always is the same: We need more contracts. It's hard to get the long-term ones, the kind that last for a year or more. We have about three of those right now. Our goal is to get more. Instead, we get a lot of last-minute requests from government groups that need, say, 100 people next week.
We discuss ways to cut costs. Instead of renting, we recently started buying equipment—uniforms, pyrotechnics, trucks, weapons, and tribal gear. Over time, that should save us a lot.
Every Tuesday, I have a big conference call with about 15 or 20 people, including our COO, CFO, VP, and every site manager involved in a current operation. We spend 45 minutes comparing notes.
When we're working on a proposal, I'll have a conference call twice a week with everyone working on the project. We'll discuss whom we would need to recruit if we got the contract—say, people who speak Pashto, one of the native languages of Afghanistan—and what sort of equipment we would need. Then we'll figure out the cost and discuss what sort of issues might come up and what strategies we would need to employ.
For contracts, we have to scope out the competitio—being in the industry, we hear things. We also subscribe to a site called Input that gives us intelligence about the different contracts coming out and who is competing for them. A lot of times, the big defense contract companies approach us, wanting to team up on a proposal, because there are quotas—a certain number of contracts are supposed to go to small businesses, woman-owned businesses, and businesses owned by service-disabled veterans.
I spend a lot of time working on proposals. On average, we submit 30 a year. Depending on the scope of the project, the proposals might be 30 to 500 pages long and take from a few days to six months to complete. For each, we have to submit our operational or technical approach—how would we go about completing that mission in detail. In the beginning, we made the mistake of offering to do more than was laid out in the requests for proposal. We never won those contracts, because the government assumed we would charge more for all the extras.
We work with a proposal development company on big, unwieldy proposals, because there are usually several volumes to submit. My team and I write all of the technical parts and then submit those to the company, which organizes the project and makes sure we adhere to the guidelines laid out in the RFP. With big proposals, we have a lot of people writing different sections, and the company helps us make sure that the information and terminology are consistent throughout.
After the proposal is finally pieced together, I'm ultimately responsible for making sure the finished product is polished and grammatically correct, and that we're accurately conveying what sets us apart from the competition. Proposals are typically awarded based on cost—the lowest bidder wins. But past performance and experience are also key. We always have to submit proof that we know what we're doing.
At some point in the afternoon, usually around 2 p.m., Carmen usually pops her head into my office and says, "Are you going to eat?" I'm on a gluten-free diet. I'm trying a holistic approach to treating my rheumatoid arthritis. It got really bad after Leah was born. It was very painful to pick her up or open a jar—let alone type. It was awful. Giving up beer has been the most difficult thing. But I'm starting to feel better, so I'm going to stick with it.
After Carmen leaves at 4:30, I stop work and focus on my kids. We go to the park or play in the backyard. At about 6, I make dinner. Then I give the kids a bath and read them some books. After I put the kids to bed, that's when my workday really starts.
While I work, I need it to be completely silent. Any little distraction throws me off. That's why I like working at night. No phones ringing, no TV, no surprise FedEx deliveries totally throwing me off my game. If the baby cries, it takes me an hour to get back to work—and remember what I was working on in the first place.
In the evenings, I answer e-mail, edit and write contract proposals, and work on the website, usually until 1 or 2 a.m. If we have a proposal deadline, I sometimes stay up all night and start over again in the morning. It's not the ideal sleep schedule, but it works for us.
