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Back in high school, Paul Strasser was a pole vaulter. “There aren“™t too many pole vaulters out there!“ he tells us. These days, Strasser is helping Pragmatics, a McLean, Va.-based company with over 400 employees, vault from one level to the next. The year he arrived at Pragmatics as chief operating officer, they closed the books at $31 million. This year, they’re going to bring in around $82 million. In the following Q&A, Strasser discusses that growth and how he is helping the company manage it.
What“™s the company“™s size “” in terms of employees and revenues?
Paul Strasser: We are about 400 employees, and we are going to do around $82 million this year. The good news is that we just won some important new business, including one very significant contract called Vanguard 1.0. These wins will lead us to approximately $120 million in revenue in our next fiscal year.
What“™s your biggest challenge in business right now as you manage this growth?
Paul Strasser: It actually is managing the growth. I“™ve been here since 2004; one month after I joined the company, we closed the books at about $31 million. So if we achieve $120 million in fiscal year 2009, that“™s quadruple the growth. We will have a compounded annual growth rate exceeding 30 percent per year “” in this business that is quite good, organically. Along with this growth comes an infrastructure growth responsibility, a staffing challenge, and then there is the ever-present need to ensure customer satisfaction and to have the right strategy in place to continue to grow at that pace.
