Last week, the GSF’s President (Stu), COO (Meaghan), and Director of Partner Relations (Steve) headed to the DC area to do nothing else but meet with GSF Corporate Partners. We have a lot of great Partners in the beltway, so we focused this trip on Partners that were new to the GSF or that we had not visited recently.
Too often when we go to DC, we get pulled in a thousand different directions…and when we leave we feel like we barely made contact with our Corporate Partners. Since our Partners are the backbone of the Foundation, we were due for a trip that was all about them.
The GSF Partner network in the National Capital Region is spread out all over DC, Northern VA, and Maryland. That meant it was time to divide and conquer as soon as the team landed in DC on Monday!
Stu went right to our newest Academic Partner–Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security, where he met with the Vice President for External Affairs, Thomas Cynkin. As a relatively new Program, Stu and Tom discussed the future of the school and ways to attract students to the program.
Stu then went to the Barbaricum offices (pictured above), where he linked up with Meaghan (who spent the afternoon visiting event venues and even getting interviewed by Women in International Security). There they met with Scott Feldmayer and other reps from Barbaricum to discuss the current SOF landscape and Barbaricum’s SOF-focused initiatives.
Steve spent the afternoon on the Virginia side of the beltway, where he met with GSF Small Business Partner System High Corp. System High is always a fun Partner to visit–especially because they hang up the signs from their Beer Garden Sponsorships at the annual Global SOF Symposium – US (shown right). Steve and System High rep Rob Howe talked about different ways System High can take advantage of their partnership with the GSF.
That evening, the team met up for dinner at the home of General Dynamics representative Mike Hatcher. He generously hosted everyone for a delicious cookout, with good conversation and an even better spread!
Day two again had the team split again, with Steve and Stu visiting relatively new Small Business Partner, Axiologic Solutions, and Meaghan heading to Fredricksburg to visit with Chuck Sheppard and others from PAE. After catching up and discussing the current SOF environment, the afternoon got a little busy…
The team ran all around the beltway to meet with an array of Corporate Partners, including Ntrepid, CACI, Vricon, and C2 Essentials–a company that the GSF actually moved to for our HR needs. #PartnerSupport!
Covering all of that ground in the NCR, it’s hard not to run into other people you know! Steve found some of his classmates from Harvard and Meaghan had a mini-reunion with some classmates from Georgetown (both shown left)… the Alumni network is strong!
The GSF team rounded out the DC trip with meetings with Textron Systems, a GSF Founding Partner and MarkLogic, a Patron Partner.
To me these visits are really important and we appreciate our partners taking time out of their busy days to show and tell us what they are doing. Knowing what our Partners are doing is gold, because we meet a lot of people from government (even from other countries), and we are constantly asked about capabilities that we recommend.”
— Stu Bradin, GSF President and CEO
Additionally, we are constantly asked about companies that other GSF partners want to work with on projects, and subsequently our business-to-business support to our GSF Partners has been huge. We love this stuff because we get to see some of the coolest technology and capabilities, but also meet the creative people that design, build, and field these capabilities.
Since everyone is always busy, the timing can be tough…we are never able to see everyone that we want to see! But, we do hope to make trips like this a more regular occurrence. Our Foundation is made up of a network of some of the most amazing people we’ve met…we need to continue to lean on the network and make it work.
Want to join this network? Learn more about Corporate Partnership here.
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