CACI's Top 100 secret? Customer satisfaction.

The U.S. economy continues its stubborn stagnation and unemployment remains high. Not that you could tell if you looked at CACI International Inc.’s performance in 2010. The Arlington, Va.-based company earned record net income last year and is seeking to fill 400 job openings – after hiring 500 new employees last year.

Keeping a tight grip on existing business while winning new work landed CACI the No. 14 spot on the Top 100, with $2.5 billion in contract awards in fiscal 2010.

Further evidence of CACI’s fortune: Net income rose by 18.7 percent to $106.5 million, compared with $89.7 million in 2009. About $5 billion in submitted proposals were still under evaluation when CACI’s fiscal year 2010 ended June 30, 2010. Almost 90 percent of those would mean new business.

“The fact that we’re getting offered more work is a testimony to the quality of the work we’re doing, the partnership we established with our customers,” said CEO Paul Cofoni. “The byproduct is we create jobs for people, which is a really fortunate position to be in.”

The company's big wins included a five-year multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $588 million to support the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems. Awarded in March, the contract calls for CACI to integrate command and control applications. In August, the company snagged one of 17 contracts on a $16.4 billion Army Communications and Electronics Command Rapid Response-Third Generation program, which builds on the company’s track record with command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems.

Although warfighter support and intelligence are CACI’s bread and butter, the company is expanding in other areas, including health IT. It won a $91 million prime contract in October to create a Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record system through which medical records can be shared among the Veterans Affairs Department, Defense Department and private physicians.

In addition to diversifying its current capabilities, CACI made a couple of acquisitions last year to help broaden its offerings. In November, it purchased geospatial specialists TechniGraphics Inc. and Applied Systems Research Inc. The buys were worth about $127.5 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“The geospatial products and services and in some cases some of the systems that they use to do that analysis helped us broaden our position in the marketplace,” said Daniel Allen, CACI’s COO.

To stay successful, CACI must stay relevant, Cofoni said. And that means helping the government cut costs. To that end, through a $75 million contract from the Military Entrance Processing Command, the company will build a product to enable the military to screen applicants online rather than paying for them to travel to a recruiting center.

“The government estimates this will save $100 million a year,” Cofoni said. “It’s with that kind of transformative re-engineering, if you will, that will get us that improvement in costs.”

Looking ahead, he said CACI will focus on one of its fastest growing business groups: intelligence, which already makes up almost half the company’s work.

“Intell is probably the most effective place for the government to invest national security dollars because it preempts the need for the use of armed forces if you get it right,” Cofoni said.

Other potential growth areas include old standbys such as defense, homeland security and IT.

Despite government and industry economic concerns, CACI has no intention of slowing down. “I like to say that we have to do two things well in this business: We have to make bold promises and deliver on them,” Cofoni said. “The bold promise stuff is all about innovation in our proposals. Execution excellence is all about delivering everything you promised and more. Those are really fundamental things that we focused really hard on here, and they’re paying off.”