RTGX Builds A Bright Future On Past Reputations

By Missy Zane



Ask Kathy Adams what she sees for the future of her business, and she'll tell you "the sky's the limit." While RTGX, her Columbia-based corporation, hasn't reached the stratosphere yet, the young company has certainly been soaring upward since reorganization in October. Since then, RTGX has landed eight contracts with such large IT services contractors as TRW. And the fledgling firm's staff has been growing at the rate of two or more employees every month.

"We're planning to add another 20 people by end of the year," said Adams, whose firm currently has about 30 employees. "We hope within the next year to add another 45-50 people. Ultimately, we'd like to be in the range of 200 employees."

RTGX's warm welcome to the IT services industry is partly due to Adams' reputation. A former National Security Agency employee, she's known at the Department of Defense (DOD) for her talent and reliability. But there's another reason, too. While RTGX is currently concentrating on DOD contracts, it has state and local government and commercial clients as well. That's unusual for an IT services firm.

The diversity makes the company an attractive place to work. "Our employees can move back and forth between government and commercial work," Adams said. They look at that as a positive. Once you've done something for a long time, you want a change. With us, they can go learn something new and then come back."

The company's core practice areas include Information Technology consulting services involving e-government enablement solutions, enterprise architecture and engineering, web-based content management and publishing solutions, project and program management, advanced network-based video conferencing and collaboration solutions, and network design, management, maintenance and help desk services. The firm is also an ATG Internet CRM and portal software reseller.



Creating A Comfortable Culture

Right from the start, Adams and her executive team, Armando Seay and Michael F. Moon, thought about future growth and ways of attracting and retaining the best talent they could find. Adams is RTGX's CEO and president, Moon is chief operating officer, and Seay is executive vice president for business development.

They built attractive employee benefits, including four weeks paid time off, medical and dental coverage, 401k, an employee assistance program and tuition reimbursement into their initial financial planning and developed what they believe is a unique culture.

A former contract employee herself, Adams knows how it feels to work for a large contractor. "Sometimes, you feel like a number," she said. "We wanted to create a family environment for our employees." In a company where most of the employees work off-site, "you have to go out of your way to make your employees feel like they're part of something," she said. "You have to have happy hours and weekend functions to keep the employees involved.

"That's hard for people to understand if they haven't been in that situation. Some employees don't mind. But there are many more who want to feel that they're part of something. They like to know they're part of a company that's growing."



Always Ambitious

Kathy Adams has been working since she was 16 years old. While a student at Baltimore's Carver Vocational-technical high school, she landed a work-study job with the city school system. Both her course work and her job were called data processing, but what she really learned were programming and software development.

Also that year, DOD tested a group of students at Adams' school for future employment.

"I took the test when I was 16, and it took 24 months to get a security clearance," she recalled. "By the time I graduated from high school, DOD had made an offer for a full-time job."

She also had an offer from the Baltimore City School System. "But I chose DOD," she said. "Maybe I thought it would be more glamorous."

Adams went to work as a computer operator at DOD that October. She asked for the 11:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. shift so she could attend college full-time during the day. At the same time, she was also taking courses at DOD.

"The courses were related to computer science and software development and programming," Adams said. "They were all specific to getting promoted. The more you learned the quicker you moved up. That was my intent from the beginning; I took on as much as I could so I could rise to the top.

"I slept from noon until it was time to get up and go to work," she recalled. "Work and school were my whole life. I've been ambitious from the beginning.

"As a teenager, I wasn't one of the privileged folks. My father passed away when I was 12, so we lived on his Social Security. I needed money just to live."

Life is different for Adams' children. Her 20-year-old daughter, Kiara, is studying computer science and writing at Rutgers University and holds several shot put records.

Her business (Ross Technologies, Inc.) is named for her 12-year-old son, Ross. She and her husband, Armando Seay, also have custody of his three nephews.

Busy as she and her husband are getting their business up and running, they "take home and family very seriously," Adams said. "We don't want our sons to think they've been forgotten because we're starting this new company." In fact, Ross joins his parents at the office almost every evening, loves computers and is learning how to build web sites.



Breaking The Glass Box

Adams worked at DOD for seven years before leaving to become a contract employee at GE Aerospace. Soon after, she had a computer science degree from the University of Maryland. And she had spent much of her time at DOD designing and implementing highly complex and mission critical computer systems. She was the lead computer scientist on many of the multi-million-dollar projects she worked on.

But she was always looking ahead. "Once I master what I'm doing, I get bored and want another challenge," she said. "After seven years, I felt that I was not going anywhere fast. Although I'd gotten promoted as quickly as anyone, it still wasn't enough." She admits she was nervous about her first job outside the government. She credits "some good mentors" within DOD with giving her the courage to make the move. She immediately discovered that it's very different being a contractor.

"The perception is that contractors make more money," she said. "Typically, that's true. But when you compare the benefits, things usually come up equal. And contractors don't have the same security.

"Back then, that was one of the things I had to think about. It was probably the scariest part. But I've never been afraid of work. And I knew I'd find something to do to keep from not doing anything."

Years later, she still keeps in touch with her former coworkers at DOD. "I think that's why we had such a good start as a company," she said. "I know the business, and I know the people, and the people know me.

"Companies that have never worked within DOD have a hard time breaking the glass box. It's a very closed community. But everybody has received us well."

And she knows how to play by the rules. "In the government, you're told what you have to do, and you do it. You can't always write the rules, but you can learn how to play the game."



A Different Career

These days, Adams spends most of her time with management duties and reintroducing herself to the people she worked with in the past. The only programming she does is "tinkering" with programs that will make her work life easier, building a database, for instance. She says she sometimes misses the hands-on computer work. "But I'll do whatever needs to be done to make us successful," she said. "If a job requires me to go back into a technical role, I'll do that, too.

"So far, we've been fortunate," she added. "We've had good opportunities for our employees. We feel like we're in a very good place at this time with the business we want to get. Having 30 individuals in this environment says something about where we're planning to go. We have employees in every sector."

And the future? "We certainly won't limit ourselves," Adams said. "The sky's the limit. And we're getting there one step at a time."

Biz Roundup By Laura Willoughby



Bankruptcy? Bah. Despite US Airways' Chapter 11 filing last month and subsequent brouhaha and speculation on what would-or could-become of the beleaguered carrier and the airports that host it, Baltimore Washington International Airport is none the worse for wear.

"We don't expect a change," said BWI spokesman Melanie Miller. "[US Air has] already downsized and sold 29 gates back to us. But they also just put in new computer machines for easy check-in and have done things to make us believe that they will be here for a certain amount of time."

Saving grace for the airport and all the travelers that use it are the other airlines that stepped up to fill in the gaps created when US Air pulled out its MetroJet service in February. With routes to far-off and unlikely places such as Detroit, Cumberland, Md., and even Nantucket, BWI is becoming something of a niche airport.

In case you're keeping track, airlines at BWI now fly direct to Denver, Hagerstown and Martha's Vineyard, to name a few, all new routes since Sept. 11. Meanwhile, carriers new to BWI stepped up to fly to other cities that were serviced by US Air's MetroJet.

Aside from US Air, all the other major carriers at BWI have posted increasing passenger numbers compared to numbers from the year before. If MetroJet hadn't pulled out, BWI would have been one of the handful of airports in the nation to post an increase in passenger numbers, according to Miller. Overall, those numbers are still 8% down. But given that the national average is down 11%, BWI is still leading the pack in the airline recovery.

One thing to note: The largest carrier at BWI for flights and passenger numbers is Southwest Airlines, the only major airline that posted increased revenue-up 8% from 2001-for the fourth quarter of 2002.



Pushing Tin

The BWI corridor can also claim a new incoming business headquarters name to its roster. More and more international companies' U.S. headquarters are relocating to the BWI region. Add to the list-which includes B.P. Solar-Hydro Aluminum, the third largest aluminum producer in the world. The company will move its 35-employee North American headquarters to offices in the BWI Corporate Center by the end of this year.



A New Meaning To House Poor

Ah, debt, that long-time scourge of recession. Certainly the over-excess of the late '90s hasn't helped this recent spate of bankruptcy filings and credit collector avoidance. But contrary to popular opinion, it isn't necessarily the down-and-out seeking protection from high debt.

According to the most recent study by Columbia-based credit counseling technology provider Amerix, it's homeowners, not renters, who are more likely to post the highest debt/income ratios. Seems that since homeowners have more expenses-repairs, maintenance and appliance purchases-they're also more likely to have higher loads of debt-credit cards, cars and homes-which can often lead to repossession.

Amerix's Quarterly Index found that the average unsecured debt for homeowners has decreased to $17,782 since 1998's $19,377 posting. But it's still above what renters average: $12,648 (down from $13,414 in 1998).

The good news here is that average debt is down from 1998's numbers, a sign that, perhaps, America is starting to catch on that too much debt isn't necessarily a good thing. Now if we could just get that through to the airlines.



Strategy Of Note: Expand To Governmental Sector

The nation may just now be recovering from a brief recession-or falling into a deeper one, depending on whom you listen to-but at least one sector isn't faring so badly at all. Chalk it up to the cyclical nature of business: When the private sector is down, the U.S. government couldn't be a better place to be, and vice versa. The trick is diversifying business so that a firm never takes too big a hit whichever way the market turns.

So we note with interest, in what's been a period of very few contract announcements, a spate of awards last month. General Physics Corporation netted two government contracts worth $46 million over five years from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, one of the largest awards ever from the branch, according to Columbia-based General Physics. GP will provide engineering systems and services for tactical and strategic combat systems and special mission sensors.

Also making a splash with the Navy was Duratek, which won a $1.36 million contract to clean the Norfolk Naval Shipyard of radioactive contaminants over the next year. Duratek provides technologies and services to clean up radioactive waste, and can count among its government customers the Department of Energy and Department of Defense facilities.