Charlie Virtue of Agilex: HR secrets to become “hottest government contractor”
July 26th, 2010 by Lisa Singh
Before its meteoric rise as the hottest government contractor in the Washington, DC area, Agilex Technologies was just a dream. And a building, an empty one at that.
Charlie Virtue recalls that day, three years ago.
At the time, this long-time HR professional had recently been hired by serial entrepreneur Bob LaRose to get Agilex off the ground. Up until that point the young technology firm amounted to just 13 people, in an office space located off a commercial strip. LaRose was thinking bigger. Way bigger. One afternoon, he asked Virtue to go for a ride with him. Pretty soon, LaRose pulled up to an empty white building, four stories high, in Chantilly, Va.
“What do you think of this building?” asked LaRose.
“Very nice,” said Virtue.
“Well, it’s ours,” said LaRose, with characteristic determination. He’d already built and sold two successful Washington area technology firms. He was ready for a third win.
From those early days Agilex Technologies has delivered on LaRose’s vision — big time, especially in top market areas like healthcare IT.
In June, Healthcare Informatics, a leading publication for healthcare CIOs, ranked Agilex Technologies among the top 100 health IT companies by revenue. Agilex also debuted as the fastest-growing vendor on the list.
Meanwhile, the employee-owned company is seeing strong growth numbers. “Q1 of this year was the best quarter in the history of the company,” says Virtue. “Q2,” he adds, “was even better.”
Then and now, recruitment remains the number one focus, says Virtue.
“Initially, we were overwhelmed with resumes because Bob’s reputation was so strong,” says Virtue, who’d previously worked with LaRose at Integic. “People were applying left and right who’d worked with us in the past.”
Today, Agilex has an employee base of roughly 200 full-time employees, including Melissa Chapman, former HHS CIO; Tim Hoescht, the company’s CTO who spent 19 years at Oracle Corporation; and Bob Otto, former CIO of the U.S. Postal Service. Plus, Agilex has about 30 additional individuals in temp-to-hire roles.
Widening the net
Helping to keep the momentum going is a strong external employee referral program.
“A lot of the people we’re going after are not on job boards actively looking,” says Virtue.
The referral program fills that gap. “If I interview you and, at the end of the interview, you’re not right for the position, I may very well ask if you know anybody who might fit,” says Virtue. “If that results in a hire,” he adds, “we give a reward for helping to find that person.”
College recruitment is also yielding results. “One of our big pushes is looking for people with analytics backgrounds,” says Virtue. Recently, Agilex has developed ties with North Carolina State University, which has a master’s program in that space. The company is also looking to forge ties with mathematics programs at Johns Hopkins, Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland, and beyond.
“We just hired our first student out of MIT, with a strong analytics and mathematics background, to support our Intel group — that’s what we’re looking for,” says Virtue.
Collaboration, visibility for employees
And once they’re on board, employees can expect plenty of collaboration, and visibility, says Virtue.
“We try to show that coming here, this is your company … you’re involved in all facets of it,” says Charlie Virtue. “You’re going to be a visible person … there are few degrees of separation between the employees and the most senior management person.”
In keeping with that spirit, Agilex recently introduced a new idea: About once a month, Agilex COO Jay Nussbaum has lunch with various employees, randomly selected from the various sectors: intelligence, healthcare, homeland security, and government services. Those meetings afford the chance for employees to share their vision for the company as well.
“It’s not just a line … employees truly have a voice here, their ideas are heard,” says Virtue.
During the summer, the Company organizes an evening by the lake. “We have little parties,” says Virtue, “just to get everybody together talking.” And, in one instance, jump into the lake. One sector president, John Edwards, wagered that if his team won a contract he’d do just that. Sure enough, they won, and he plunged.
Now Virtue is looking for the next great challenge. “If I can get [a sector president] to commit to something equally outrageous, our employees will work twice as hard to make it happen,” he says, in good humor.
“We’re on a journey”
It’s that mix of camaraderie and forward-looking vision that Virtue, and senior management, want to preserve, just as the company continues to grow.
“We’re on a journey,” says Virtue, simply.
It’s a journey that began three years ago, this month, when a handful of Agilex employees moved into that big, empty building that Bob LaRose had set his sights on. LaRose passed away earlier this year. What he set out to accomplish endures, says Virtue.
“This company was built by an entrepreneur and that spirit lives on,” says Virtue. LaRose’s vision, he adds, was to reach $500 million in revenue within a 10-year period.
So, will Agilex make it?
Virtue doesn’t skip a beat. “We’re on our way,” he says, “This train has left the station.”
