Andre Gudger has grown DoD’s small business contracts
Andre Gudger has heard the argument many times that, as he puts it, “small businesses don’t build planes and ships and nuclear weapons.”
It’s his job — or at least part of it — to change that perception.
A Maryland native, Gudger has been the director of the Defense Department’s Office of Small Business Programs since 2011. During the three years prior to his arrival, the share of the agency’s contracts awarded to small companies had shrunk every year. Moreover, in the more than three decades since federal small-business contracting goals had been put in place, the agency had never once accomplished them.
In the three years since, even amid budgetary constraints, small-business participation in Defense Department projects has expanded each year. In fact, this past year, the agency for the first time eclipsed not only its small-business goal, but also the federal government’s target, awarding roughly 23.4 percent of defense contracting dollars, representing about $53 billion, to small employers.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/operation-small-business-an-interview-with-the-pentagons-small-business-director/2014/10/23/216d4cc8-5a12-11e4-b812-38518ae74c67_story.html
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