|
ExecutiveBiz: What’s your background?
Raymond Roberts:
I’ve owned or co-owned, and built four companies – five if you include the tutoring business I started in college. I majored in mathematics but have had business in my blood all my life. I was raised lower-middle-class in a blue-collar town. Ever since I was 16 years old, and first caught a glimpse of CNN, the only thing I ever saw was Washington DC. I thought it was the most amazing place in the world, and I made a decision that one day I would come here and have a business. When I was 29, I did that, emigrating to the United States and coming to DC to work for Texas Instruments. I left them to start my third business, which I sold, and then co-founded this company with Alba Alemán.
ExecutiveBiz: Why did you change your company’s name to Citizant?
Raymond Roberts:
Over the past eight years we’ve worked hard to establish a strong, positive reputation in the market. And at this juncture in our business strategy, we realized that in order to best support our growth plan, we really need to be able to reinforce our reputation in the market with a brand that helped tell our story, tell people what we’re all about, tell them what makes us unique. Ultimately, our goal is to help our government customers better serve their end customers — who are either civilians or warfighters. We take that personally. When we talk about “My Citizen,” we’re talking about our personal commitment to the people served by our government. Those people are all of us, including our associates and all of our family and friends. That’s the essence behind our new brand, “Citizant.” We’re very aware that ultimately, it’s the citizen who will benefit from our work. That’s what drives our passion. That’s why we’re dedicated to delivering the best business and technology solutions to the government.
ExecutiveBiz: What does Citizant do?
Raymond Roberts:
Citizant provides professional technical and business services solutions to government clients. We hire the smartest people and put them in front of our customers to help solve their hottest business and technology problems. We have expertise in a wide range of technical and program management areas, including enterprise architecture, information quality, and application development. Those smart people I talk about, well, they’ve developed one of the best, most effective methodologies for cleaning data. Because we focus on top people, processes and performance, and take an entrepreneurial “smart business” approach to government services, we’re nimble—which means we can turn around projects fast, and deliver top-quality solutions, in creative ways, and in a cost effective manner.
ExecutiveBiz: Who are some of your customers?
Raymond Roberts:
We support about 25 to 30 customers that span across federal civilian agencies as well as many organizations within the Department of Defense. We’re the prime contractor for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Housing Locator System, which is helping people across the country impacted by disasters find housing. We also support the Departments of the Interior, Treasury, Transportation, Homeland Security and Customs Border Patrol, DISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many others. We also subcontract with other companies, such as SAIC, which is our mentor in the DISA’s mentor-protégé program.
ExecutiveBiz: What’s the main reason Citizant has had such tremendous growth and success in the past 8 years?
Raymond Roberts:
A 101%, 8-year CAGR means only one thing: fanatical planning and disciplined execution. We actually wrote in our original business plan that we’d qualify for the Washington Technology Fast 50 list – but we were pleasantly surprised be #1 like we were in 2004. We have a strategy that predates our company’s existence – I like to call it my nine-point plan. The first point is the discipline of “Process For Profit.” Once you’ve mastered that, you can accelerate your growth, as long as you continue to tighten up and expand your processes to stay profitable. Some of the other elements of ‘process for profit” are equally important, such as having a vision, hiring the most talented people, and working really hard — my business partner, Alba, works harder than I do. We continue to have success with a track record that includes 30 consecutive quarters of profit and growth. I’ve probably been called a nasty name or two for my insistence on performance, but we’ve always been very disciplined at sticking to our plan.
ExecutiveBiz: What major challenges will you face during the next 12 months?
Raymond Roberts:
I think that making smart choices about acquisitions and integrating them successfully are going to be the biggest challenges. We want to acquire at least one company in the next 12 months, and two to three more by 2009. We’ll need to find the right companies to buy and make sure that the integration methodology is well thought out and deliberate, because acquisitions need to be a successful venture. There’s no room for failure and it will take a new level of leadership to make that happen. I’m working on my leadership skills every day.
ExecutiveBiz: This isn’t the first company you’ve built; how is this one different from the others?
Raymond Roberts:
Well, it’s a hell of lot more successful, for one thing. It’s a good thing that I’ve built four companies, because with the first three I learned painful lessons from making a lot of mistakes, even though they were profitable ventures. In founding this company with Alba in 1999, we benefited from those past lessons, and also benefited from being able to apply best practices from our combined experiences in both startups and Fortune 500 companies. This company has had to deal with a lot less lingering “baggage” because we’ve made fewer mistakes. Mistakes don’t go away once you’ve made them in a company and they sometimes take a long time to fade away. The fewer you have, the more nibble and agile you remain for longer periods of time. It’s like having the maturity of a 50-year old with the physical attributes of a teenager who hasn’t started drinking, smoking and eating fast food yet. Citizant is also built more solidly around the core values that Alba and I have always known we share. We’ve been very clear about what those values are, and we’ve surrounded ourselves with people who also share them. We hire, train and reward against our core values – they are the north star of this company.
ExecutiveBiz: What will Citizant look like 5 years from now?
Raymond Roberts:
The cool thing is that as we enter our ninth year of business, most of the infrastructure is now in place. What’s really going to be different about the company going forward are metrics and dimensions. Like this year, we added a marketing department. That’s a whole new structure, and there aren’t many more structures to add. There will be refinements, but the major functions of the company are in place. What we’ll have going forward is just adding mass to the framework. The metrics will simply have more zeroes behind them. In five years, I expect our revenues to be closing in on $100 million. We will be servicing 100 or more customers and will have a national footprint in servicing our government customers.
ExecutiveBiz: What’s something that most people don’t know about you?
Raymond Roberts:
I don’t worry about things like pain. Three years ago I broke my leg at 9,000 feet in the Austrian Alps. I was on a slope I shouldn’t have been on, and it was my first year skiing big mountains. The surgical reconstruction of my knee was complicated by an infection that almost killed me. I was away from work for four months and it really took me a year to recover from that surgery. I couldn’t walk straight, but I had the determination and discipline to do what it took to correct that. The next year I went back and took lessons, and continued to build the strength in my leg. This past ski season I took my daughter skiing on black double diamond slopes in the Italian Alps. She’s a great skier and we had a great time on those mountains. I’m like a pit bull on a rump roast – when I want to do something, I do it. A little pain is sometimes worth the view from the summit.
ExecutiveBiz: What’s it like working with your wife as president?
Raymond Roberts:
It’s fun! And I have a business partner who I trust 100 percent. When Alba and I started this business together we were just business partners. We had worked together at Texas Instruments in the mid ‘90s. One year ago, after seven years together as co-founders of one of the fastest growing technology businesses in the DC area, we got married on a little sandy beach in St. John, USVI. Alba will always give me the truth. There’s no moment when either of us gets a CYA moment and there’s no politics. The biggest advantage is that we’re business partners 24 hours a day. The bad news is, we have conversations about this business 24 hours of the day. You have to have boundaries and give yourself time away, and give yourself time for hobbies that allow you to be a family, because you need that side of your life also. And we have an absolutely wonderful, smart 12-year-old daughter who keeps us grounded on the things that are most important in life.
For more information about
Citizant, visit
www.citizant.com.
Interview with Raymond Roberts conducted by JD Kathuria.
Enjoy this interview?
Digg It!
Check out more Executive Spotlights ...
|
