Attain starts out strong as BearingPoint successor

Attain LLC is less than a year old, but the professional services company already has gone through a name change and closed 20 new contracts and six follow-on awards worth a total of more than $13 million.

Founded last year as Eclat Consulting LLC, the company had an advantage unusual for startups: Attain was created from the parts of the public sector group at BearingPoint that Deloitte couldn't acquire.

They were choice assets and were purchased through private funding, said Greg Baroni, Attain’s chairman and chief executive officer, who spent nearly three decades in leadership positions at KPMG Consulting and Unisys Corp.

Baroni, his federal services president Richard Roberts, and the other founders inherited more than 100 of BearingPoint’s contracts, about 200 former employees and major clients such as the Veterans Affairs Department, the Army and the National Institutes of Health.

“From the legacy of BearingPoint we’re able to capitalize on all of their past qualifications,” Baroni told Washington Technology. “Yet at the same time we’re small. We’re nimble, we have the agility of a small firm and can operate more quickly and create a differentiator from that vantage point.”

The company became operational five months ago.

Among Attain’s first wins was a one-year contract continuation to provide strategic services to the Army Reserve Component Automation System for IT solutions in support of training, mobilization and administration.

Baroni said the company’s primary focus will continue to be the federal market, including cloud computing, energy and health care services. Attain also will seek out research organizations, institutes of higher learning, and the state and local market.

Roberts, who was chief operating officer at BearingPoint, said he believes BearingPoint’s divestiture has put Attain in an advantageous position to maintain the existing federal contracts and going after new ones.

“The people stayed and the clients stayed, so it’s a very strong core of long-term client relationships,” he said. “This is not a startup [company].”

In fact, Baroni said, he opted not to seek 8(a) small business status setting up the company. “We’re not playing one of the small-business cards at this point, though we are considered small business. We go at everything in full and open competition. I don’t want to have that [status] as a crutch as we go into the marketplace.”

Company revenues now are “just shy of $50 million,” Baroni said, adding that he wants Attain to reach the $500 million mark by 2015, “a big portion of that coming from the federal marketplace.”