Find your niche and hire the right people

Morgan Borszcz Consulting is a minority, woman-owned, disadvantaged 8(a) small business that has scored major revenue gains during the past five years.

Specializing in large-scale solutions including supply chain management and enterprise resource planning, the Arlington, Va., company has seen its revenues increase from $256,000 in 2004 to $8.6 million in 2008.

Its five-year growth rate of 140.6 percent places MBC at No. 12 on this year’s Fast 50 rankings.

Christine Morgan, chief executive officer and president, founded Morgan Borszcz Consulting as Morgan Business Consulting, in 2001 at her home in Ashburn, Va., a sole proprietorship delivering business intelligence solutions.

Morgan said she believes MBC has grown so rapidly because the company has focused on its contract goals, attracted good corporate officials and hired almost 100 well-qualified employees.

MBC was incorporated in 2003. A year later, her husband, Michael Morgan, left his consulting position at BearingPoint to join the company as chief operating officer and vice president.

“For the first couple of years, we were basically independent consultants,” Michael Morgan said. “But by 2006, we had begun to do some defense work, and Matt Borszcz joined us and we began [hiring] actual employees to support those contracts.”

At present, about half of MBC’s employees are in the Washington metropolitan area, and the other half work in Dayton, Ohio, mainly on Air Force contracts.

Borszcz, who also worked at BearingPoint managing many of the company’s supply chain efforts for the Air Force, is based at MBC’s Dayton offices.

Although most of MBC’s work has been with the Air Force, the company recently landed a major foreign military sales award from the Navy.

The award, which company officials said falls in the $2.7 million range, calls for MBC to help the Navy manage its sales of U.S.-made torpedoes to allied nations.

“We literally just started that this year,” Christine Morgan said, adding that MBC took over the contract when BearingPoint closed its consulting business.

MBC has been able to do well despite the deep economic recession because the company focuses on values and not simply on resources, Christine Morgan said. “We try to provide a consistent delivery of valuable services.”

When a contractor does that, she added, “The word gets around.”

Christine Morgan said she would advise government contractors to emulate MBC and look for potential employees who have a strong command of their skills “because that’s who we’re going to present to the client every day. We want them to have unique skills.”

“There are certain tasks, skills, jobs that really are not inherently government or [where] the niche is so small it would preclude the Air Force from pulling in those resources,” Borszcz said. “Those are the types of opportunities that you need to be focused on.”