Mar 22, 2020
CFOTL: Tell us about this business - what does it do and what are its offerings?
Richards: Centauri is a government
services business. We've been growing at about 20% a year, on an
organic-only basis, for the past four or five years. We just
reached just under $500 million in revenue in 2019, and I'm looking
to continue growing in the 20% to 30% range in 2020. We're really
focused on space and missile defense and where those domains
intersect and create sort of an ecosystem in the defense world. We
focus on employing what we believe really is our strength, which is
the top technical and specialized talent needed to support the
missions of our customers. What makes us different from other
government services providers is our focus on the people. I think
that a lot of government services companies see the billable staff
as not really employees of the company but just products that are
being sold. When one contract goes away, so do their products, and
when you get a new contract, you go hire new people.
We really focus on our technical talent as part of the company.
They're not tied to a specific contract or project, but we will
develop their career, invest in them from a training and
professional development perspective, and move them between
projects so that they get enhanced skills that allow them to move
up in their career. This allows us to retain a lot of the really
critical talent that our customers need and move them between
various kinds of mission sets over time. This really separates us
from the other sort of body shop types of government services
businesses.
The next 12 months are really about process optimization. We're
setting goals right now and objectives for 2020 that are really
based on looking at what we're doing and figuring out how we can do
it better. How can we measure this? How can we identify that we've
successfully improved the way that we do business and operated
within the CFO organization to better support the company's growth
through better and stronger processes and optimizing the way that
we do business?