William McCormick
Mike Corkery, president and CEO of Deltek, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding Deltek’s upcoming 40th anniversary as well as his decade with the company to drive significant growth, including his leadership to drive success for the company’s workforce and its customers.
In addition, the two-time Wash100 Award recipient discussed how Deltek has built a strong company culture and addresses the challenges of federal recruitment. Corkery also talked about the release of Deltek Costpoint as well as how the defense and intelligence community could be impacted by current national security challenges during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“Deltek is obviously very bullish on the government contracting space. We’re very excited about being a part of the ecosystem and continuing to enable our customers’ success both in the government contracting industry as well as other project based commercial markets.
Deltek is in a great spot. I’ve never been more excited about our prospects. As we enter our 40th year, we’re so fortunate to be in a really good position in great markets with fantastic customers to work with every day.”
You can read the full Executive Spotlight interview with Deltek CEO Mike Corkery below:
ExecutiveBiz: With Deltek’s 40th anniversary coming up next year, as well as your 10th year as CEO, can you tell us what led to Deltek’s growth and a record-breaking 2021? How will you carry that momentum through the rest of this year and focus on your people and customers?
Mike Corkery: “We’re obviously very excited about our upcoming 40th anniversary next year. It’s a significant milestone for us. That’s four decades of leadership in our target markets, which we think is something to be very proud of.
One of the reasons 2021 was a record year for us was because our focus coming out of 2020 and the pandemic. Deltek wanted to exit that timeframe a better business than we were going into it. During that time, we continued to invest in our solutions and enable our customers. We wanted to be a better business and we were fortunate to be able to do that.
We navigated 2020 very successfully and that launched us into arguably the best single year of our company’s history in 2021. Thus far in 2022, we have been able to maintain that momentum and we’re off to a strong start.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we’ve kept our momentum and our team deserves all the credit for ensuring the success for our company. It was a fantastic effort and we’re carrying that momentum into 2022.
Overall, we saw great growth across all of our target markets. We extended our leadership in GovCon, architecture and engineering, and construction has been a very fast growth market for us. Deltek is now firmly in the SMB space and our construction team had a fantastic year.
Deltek achieved a lot of growth in 2021 across the board and we’re not looking to slow down. At this point, we will stay focused on project-based businesses. We’re going to stay in our lane, but we’re also looking for additional solutions through M&A activity. We’re always looking to add solutions that are relevant in our target markets and add more value to our existing solution set for our target markets.”
ExecutiveBiz: As we talk about your company culture and Deltek Project Nation, you’ve said that “brilliant jerks don’t make it at Deltek.” What are the core values that you look for in talent recruitment and how are you addressing the complex issues around talent and retainment in the federal landscape? How have you kept Deltek’s culture going through the pandemic?
Mike Corkery: “Deltek has a strong set of core values that keep us organized in terms of how our people work together as a team, as well as how we engage with our customers and deliver our growth expectations. Those are critically important to us and we also look for our people to have our values be important in their own day-to-day lives.
For instance, two of our core values are collaboration and speed. We need to be collaborative and operate with speed. The phrase I’ve used before is, ‘brilliant jerks don’t make it at Deltek.’ The meaning behind that is based on our company looking for like-minded people who are proficient at what they do and can work across the organization effectively.
In order to get the right answers to the questions, we are asking with speed. It’s critical for us to operate with tempo and a quick pace because our customers have high expectations and we need to deliver on those.
To keep our company culture together at Deltek, we have worked hard to try and maintain our culture through the pandemic and workforce changes we’ve all undergone the past few years. I think Deltek had a bit of an advantage – about a third of our team was already working virtually even before the pandemic because of the nature of what we do.
We had embraced the virtual component of our talent management and strategy well ahead of the curve. Once we all had to go virtual overnight, it was easier for us to leverage our capabilities in order to adapt very quickly to those challenges.
We’ve been fortunate to have a great team and be recognized as a top workplace. The Washington Post recognized us as one of the best places to work in the D.C. area. And Forbes also recognized Deltek as one of the best midsize employers this year. We’re pretty proud of those accolades because Deltek is a great place to work and the company is recognized as such.
And we deliver great outcomes for our customers. We are really proud of our team and we believe we have the right team on the field. Deltek being a great place to work means we will deliver in the right way for our customers. We’re fortunate that Deltek has been able to maintain the right kind of profile in terms of how we balance delivery for our team and our customers.”
ExecutiveBiz: Most recently, Deltek unveiled the newest release of Deltek Costpoint. What can you tell us about the program’s impact on your customers and how it helps support them to complete their missions and addresses their needs to keep up with the speed of innovation in the federal sector?
Mike Corkery: “Costpoint enables digital transformation for our government customers. There’s a wide variety of new functionality and ease of use that will help people be faster and more efficient in their daily functions. There are also more and more mid and small sized businesses entering the government contracting space and we are continually adding an accelerated number of them to our customer base.
We want to make sure that we’re adding things to our solutions that appeal to what our customers are looking for, so we spent a lot of time ensuring that Costpoint was easier to use and easier to adopt and understand. I think we will see even more iterations of Costpoint that will deliver and promote automation for the entire project lifecycle.
There also needs to be a heavy focus on cybersecurity compliance. Deltek has been a leader for a really long time in terms of enabling financial compliance, but the compliance needs that federal contractors operate with have naturally shifted to be more cyber focused.
Costpoint provides the accounting infrastructure to enable business to implement FAR and DFARS compliant processes and we continually monitor changes in the regulatory environment to meet the most up-to-date government and agency cybersecurity compliance standards.
That is something that is table stakes and is really, really important for the process of pursuing contracts and new business. Costpoint 8.1 is on the path and we will continue to pursue CMMC 2.0 certification at Maturity Level (ML) 2 for our GovCon Cloud Moderate offering.
We are absolutely intent on maintaining and enabling our cybersecurity compliance in the same way that we have provided the leadership around financial compliance. We’re really excited about the early returns and early feedback thus far. It’s all been very positive and we have more releases coming soon. Stay tuned.”
ExecutiveBiz: Deltek’s GovWin IQ service found that $629 billion was spent in the GovCon sector last year. With federal agencies focusing on IT modernization efforts and tech adoption, what do you see as the major changes coming to our sector and how will defense agencies and the intelligence community be impacted by the current set of national security challenges?
Mike Corkery: “It’s always interesting to get data back from the ever changing landscape of government contracting. We will continue to monitor that funding outlook. The funding around the pandemic response is still evolving and part of our landscape now.
There’s been a huge shift in terms of how we think about national security and cybersecurity based on the world stage. The pandemic, cybersecurity breaches and national events highlight many of the areas on which the government relies on federal contractors’ expertise, so contractors can expect more reporting, execution and compliance demands. We’re anticipating significant momentum behind all these things as we move forward.
There may be more shifts in priorities based on the world stage or any number of factors, but I think federal contractors who step up to those needs and have the ability to do so, are the ones who will continue to win where others may need to take a step back.
Deltek is obviously very bullish on the government contracting space. We’re very excited about being a part of the ecosystem and continuing to enable our customers’ success both in the government contracting industry as well as other project based commercial markets.
Deltek is in a great spot. I’ve never been more excited about our prospects. As we enter our 40th year, we’re so fortunate to be in a really good position in great markets with fantastic customers to work with every day.”
