Mission focus marks REI Systems' 35-year journey

REI Systems has come a long way since Shyam Salona and Veer Bhartiya founded the company 35 years ago in the basement of Salona's townhouse.

But as REI's has grown from two partners to a midsized firm with 850 employees, the foundation of the company’s strategy remains unchanged: a focus on the mission and belief that small teams can make a significant difference.

“I was working for a large commercial IT company and I was part of a hundred-person team,” Salona told us. Half of the team was in New Hampshire and the other half in Colorado Springs.

Salona began thinking about how to do things differently. He concluded that smaller teams had more passion and helped each other.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could that?” was a question he began asking.

At the same time, Salona had risen to a senior technical position and he began asking what’s next for his career. Colleagues told him it was time to play office politics if he wanted to advance to a higher level.

“I’m not built to do that and I don’t even want to try,” Salona said.

Those two triggers led to the creation of REI Systems in 1989. He described it as an experiment.

“Can we create an environment where small teams pursue meaningful work and are passionate about it? Can we create an environment where politics doesn’t play a role?” he said.

With little more than that idea and vision, Salona and Bhartiya launched the company whose three-letter acronym stands for Reliable, Effective and Innovative.

REI was not an overnight success, but did get some luck early on when it won a Small Business Innovation Research grant with NASA to build an electronic handbook. That win kept the lights on for Salona and Bhartiya.

The first employee hire joined REI in 1994. Samidha Manu joined them in the basement and today is the company’s vice president of civilian business.

REI was able to sustain itself with SBIR work and selling software to support health care practices, but the big break came in 1997 when the Washington Post published an article about NASA trying to create a paperless office. That story highlighted the work REI was doing.

The jolt of publicity gave the company some needed visibility. Salona said that soon after the story's publication, REI demonstrated capabilities for the Justice Department's chief information officer at the company’s two-room office in Vienna, Virginia.

“We heard about the work you did and we need your help,” the CIO told them.

Congress had just passed a law to speed the process for getting bulletproof vests into the hands of state and local police forces. Justice needed support.

“We got our first, large five-year contract and that’s when we knew we were here to stay,” Salona said.

That contract also brought home the importance of the mission to Salona and his team. After supporting the program for a few years, Salona received a call from a police officer in Kentucky.

The officer told Salona that he was involved in a shooting, but was wearing the body armor his department received through the system REI built. That system helped save the officer's life.

“It made you realize that even through you are doing this tech stuff, the impact it has is huge,” Salona said. “Our mission to leverage technology to achieve public sector missions and improve millions of lives hasn't changed.

REI also continues to prioritize small, agile teams focused on mission impact over mere contract fulfillment.

"Success for us isn't just about meeting budget and schedule requirements," Salona explains. "It's about making a tangible impact on our customers' missions and beneficiaries."

The company today is focused on application modernization, government data analytics, grant management systems, case management, advisory services and SBIR opportunities.

REI graduated from the 8(a) small business program in 2007. Most of its work has since been won in full-and-open competitions.

Most companies in the market look for differentiators as they go into competitions. For REI, mission impact is a key.

“With every engagement we define successes: Have you made a difference for our customer, for our beneficiary? How are we impacting the mission?” Salona said.

REI continues to rely on small teams because of the connection they can make with the mission.

“That’s what makes the work meaningful,” he said. “You’re not just writing code to meet the requirement.”

Health is a key mission area for REI and particularly with the Health Resources Services Administration. They also have a large presence at the Food and Drug Administration and the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs.

REI supports the inspection of food and drugs that are imported into the United States. The General Services Administration is another large customer, Salona said.

As a successful midsized company, Salona acknowledged that REI is often approached by private equity firms and other potential buyers, but that does not interest him.

The company has a small employee-stock ownership plan in place that Salona may expand.

“With private equity the focus turns to numbers and your quarterly results,” he said. “We are fortunate to be privately held and we believe the impact will create the numbers. Pursue the impact as your primary focus and the rest will happen automatically.”