Building Organizational Stability and Value

Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF): I recently had the opportunity my framework on growing an organization's stability and value, to avoid grow leading to "house of cards" fragility and then moderated a great panel with three CEOs sharing their battle scars on scaling beyond the "small business" designation. You can review the full slide deck from the presentation here.

Scaling a business in the GovCon space is rarely a straight line. Last week, I had the privilege of joining the February 2026 Veteran Institute for Procurement (VIP) ADVANCE cohort to unpack friction points that emerge when a company transitions from a scrappy, founder-led startup into a mature, highly-valued organization.

Here are a few highlights from the session and the conversations that followed.

The Presentation: How to Grow Business Value

During my presentation, we focused on the fundamental shift required to build enterprise value: moving from a reliance on "Heroes" to a reliance on "Systems." Early-stage growth often depends on sheer willpower, tribal knowledge, and leaders who act as expert firefighters. But as an organization scales, those same leaders become the primary bottleneck. To truly grow business value you have to design an operational infrastructure that can run without you.

We dove deep into the core pillars required to make that shift:

• Leadership & Cultural Alignment: Being intentional about the culture you are building and learning how to effectively delegate the "monkeys" off your back.
• Strategic Planning: Decomposing high-level vision into traceable, weekly execution priorities.
• Operational Infrastructure: Establishing a single source of truth for your tech stack and codifying your "way of working" into an Organizational Playbook.
• Execution & Performance: Installing a rigid operational cadence to review strategy, manage exceptions, and continuously reduce process debt.

If you’d like to review the specific frameworks and metrics we discussed, you can view the full slide deck here: How to Grow Business Value (VIP ADVANCE - Feb 2026).

The Panel: CEO Lessons Learned – "Beyond Small"

Following the presentation, I had the honor of moderating the "CEO Lessons Learned Panel: Beyond Small." We discussed a variety of topics, including how to balance delegation while still ensuring quality and consistency, navigating market uncertainty, how to build great sales/business development organizations, when to outsource, how to optimize value of contract vehicles, and how to position organizations to be attractive acquisitions.

VIP always attracts great leaders, which makes it such a rewarding time to share my perspective and stories, and catch up with old friends from the VIP staff and other volunteer presenters.

Interested in discussing more?

What is your biggest bottleneck right now? If you are feeling the friction of the "Hero" trap in your own organization, let’s connect. Reach out on LinkedIn.