Mac Curtis, President and CEO of Vangent

This is an exciting time for Vangent. Since it celebrated its one-year anniversary this past February, the company has been embarking on a productive year chockful of new goals, aspirations, and strategies. Mac Curtis, president and CEO of Vangent, has been communicating that vision to employees ever since. Over the past year, he has spent a significant amount of time on the road, meeting with employees and discussing Vangent’s overall mission.

What are you working on these days?

Mac Curtis: Vangent is continuing to grow, and we are improving the way we position ourselves in the market. A lot of people think we are just a customer relationship management (CRM) contact center company, but that is only one aspect of our business. Granted, we are the sole provider of the nation’s largest citizen contact management programs, 1-800-Medicare, but what really separates us from other companies are the people, processes and technology behind the scenes. When we talk about Vangent’s “design, build and operate” approach, we create and implement the systems that allow mission-critical processes to function.

We celebrated our one-year anniversary this past February as Vangent. It has been an interesting year, to say the least. When we were sold by Pearson, we had to take the time to hone our own goals, aspirations and strategies. After we decided where we wanted to take the business, the next step was communicating our vision for the future to our employees. I have spent a lot of time on the road visiting with employees around the country, and when I meet with them, we talk about the company’s mission and vision. This is an exciting time for Vangent, and the employees know it. They get charged up when they see we are working hard to brand Vangent.

What’s happened in the past year, in particular?

Mac Curtis: Sure. The sales process was pretty involved. We reached an agreement in November 2006 with Veritas and shortly after that, we went on the road to sell bonds needed to finance the deal. On February 14, 2007, we officially became Vangent and began the process of transitioning from Pearson. That meant bringing on a wide variety of services that Pearson previously provided, such as a human resources information system, as well as network and infrastructure support. We also had to put treasury, tax and the general counsel functions in place — all the things you need to have to be a stand-alone business. We made some strategic organizational changes and brought on new leaders to build our health solutions business and our civilian, defense and national security divisions. We focused on building the right management team that can take Vangent from a run rate of $600M to a billion dollars and eventually a public company.

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