ENTREPRENEUR SPOTLIGHT

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ENTREPRENEUR SPOTLIGHT

M. TiTi McNeill President/CEO TranTech Inc. 4900 Seminary Road Suite 215 Alexandria, Va. 22311 (703) 671-9873 fax: (703) 671-8484

TiTi McNeill laughs as she recalls riding her bike home from work at 2 a.m. each day after she came to the United States from Vietnam in 1975. Working for a hotel at the time, this was the only way that she could get home long after public transportation had closed. This same dogged determination has helped McNeill build her information services company, TranTech, into a business with $3.4 million in revenue and a five-year growth rate of 3,864 percent.

McNeill founded TranTech as a high-end Oracle and Sybase database design and development consulting company in 1989, while working full time as a consultant for Federal Home Loan Bank, Reston, Va. Since then her business has expanded to cover information engineering, systems and software re-engineering, software development, applications migration, database design and integration, and management services markets. The company is divided into three major business areas: systems integration, software engineering and information engineering.

Although TranTech participates in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program, McNeill is not yet an enthusiastic supporter of the program. She found that qualifying for the 8(a) classification, which TranTech did in 1993, did not equal contracts.

"8(a) can be a very good program for a lot of people," McNeill said. "It has not been as productive a program for me because I haven't had strong contacts in the [Defense Department or the General Services Administration]."

Whereas many 8(a)-qualified companies are looking to gain more commercial work and less 8(a) business, TranTech is looking to beef up its position in this market.

At the moment, only 11 percent of TranTech's contracts are within 8(a), while 68 percent of the company's business is in subcontracting. TranTech serves as prime contractor on 20 percent of its work.

TranTech is a subcontractor to numerous companies including CACI, TRW, Oracle, MCI and Sprint on efforts with the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Postal Service, the Treasury Department and private firms such as ICMA Retirement Corp.

McNeill said her goal is to penetrate DoD markets in the coming year since the company has only a certain amount of time to work within the 8(a) program. "Commercial will always be there," she said.

McNeill is counting on the fact that TranTech has not been forced to depend on 8(a) contracts in the past to help the company secure its future.

-Matt Hines