FAST 50: How Blue Skies found its singular sweet spot in the market

As with any founder-led company, the starting point for the engineering and professional services provider about to be described in this story did not always have the kind of outlook described in its name.

For Blue Skies, its architects figured out early on after the 2018 launch that the ammunition and armaments corner of the government market was exactly where they want to be instead of IT services.

IT and software are still a core component of what Blue Skies does, given how those tools largely run the world and is a must for any kind of modernization.

“The technology and research-and-development that’s going on for the next armament systems and the future of what those look like, the artillery and munitions, there’s so much software and cyber now attached to everything,” said Dawn Winters, co-founder and principal at Blue Skies.

Blue Skies comes in at position No. 12 on the 2024 Washington Technology Fast 50 rankings of the government market’s fastest-growing small businesses. The 25-employee company recorded $4 million in revenue during 2023, which translates to a five-year compound annual growth rate of 75.4%.

Substantially all of Blue Skies’ prime contract work centers around Picatinny Arsenal, a government-owned facility in northern New Jersey that houses small arms cartridge ammunition research and manufacturing.

“Everything we’re doing right now is in some form or fashion a part of the defense industrial base,” Dustin DeFee, Blue Skies’ other co-founder and principal, told WT.

Alongside that, Blue Skies also counts many of the defense industry’s largest blue chip hardware makers as key business partners. Many of them make the kind of munitions and other items that Blue Skies specializes in knowledge of and support for.

DeFee told us that meetings with employees at the likes of General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are a regular occurrence for his team.

“We’re in that business, we don’t manufacture anything, but we know how to do it,” DeFee said. “We’ve got people on our team who develop production lines for ammunition, who have built out ammunition plant facilities. They’re a lot of highly-skilled technical people in a very niche market that’s very relevant to our business case.”

The work to keep those munition stockpiles aplenty and ensure they are ready for future conflicts has been front-and-center for the past two-and-a-half years since Russia invaded Ukraine.

DeFee told us that Blue Skies is in the thick of those efforts not just for today, but for tomorrow. As he and Winters both pointed out, many of these ammunition plans were built out in the 1940s and 1950s with the 1970s being the last time period they were modernized.

Winters touted Blue Skies’ specialty in all of that as largely around industrial engineering and mechanical engineering.

Team size is another aspect of Blue Skies the company has to lean into for its pursuits of future business opportunities that lay down the growth foundation.

Winters moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 2021 so the company could target its core market and customer constituency. Huntsville is a hub for Army activities as the city is where Redstone Arsenal is located.

“These officers become colonels and they bounce between one arsenal to another, so sometimes our relationship is with one here, and now he’s the colonel on this particular project,” Winters said. “We’ve got to know where the people know us.”

As Blue Skies goes about its next three-to-five years, DeFee cited “never losing track of our people” as a priority even with the push for continued and focused growth in its enterprise.

Huntsville and the defense industrial base will likely remain the company’s core constituencies, DeFee added.