Podcast
The Pilot Trap: Why an SDVOSB Founder Refuses the VA’s Favorite Word | Michael Schmitt
He spent half a million dollars of his own money, put his platform inside the VA’s own cloud, and then told the government he didn’t want a pilot. In this Success After Service episode, a 100% service-disabled Marine explains why refusing the pilot is the whole strategy.
In this Success After Service special episode of GovCon Unscripted, Mike Schmitt retired from the Marine Corps in 2004, spent years in medical devices at Medtronic, and then did something few small-business owners attempt: he self-funded a clinical toxicology lab, built his own laboratory information system, and stood it up inside the VA Enterprise Cloud through Syncly Direct so it could do imaging, lab, and AI in one place.
As a 100% service-disabled veteran running an SDVOSB, he learned the federal market the hard way. In this conversation with host Chelsea Roberts, he lays out the argument at the center of his approach: the pilot-and-funding cycle rarely produces anything, so instead of asking the VA for money and two years, he arrives already built, already authorized, and sells the result. He talks through the siloed VA and its VISNs, the records gap that leaves veterans carrying binders between systems, the credibility discount a small business faces against Deloitte and Oracle, the commercial dual-use of the platform in substance-abuse testing, and why, for him, this is about veterans taking care of veterans.
Timestamps:
00:00 Welcome and who Mike Schmitt is
01:00 From the Marine Corps and Medtronic into toxicology
02:00 Going in as a 100% service-disabled veteran (2018–2019)
03:00 Crossing the Rubicon: the MOU and interservice agreement
05:00 Building his own lab system and moving to AWS GovCloud
06:00 Syncly Direct inside the VA Enterprise Cloud
07:00 The records gap: a pregnant veteran and the PACT Act
09:00 The siloed VA and the VISNs
11:00 An agnostic platform: “Uber healthcare”
12:00 Lobbyists, the Hill, and why he walked away
13:00 The credibility discount: “if I’m not a Deloitte or an Oracle”
16:00 HIPAA and the compliance gap
20:00 Why he refuses the pilot
21:00 A nine out of ten, and the 2026 FORUM Innovation Award
23:00 Commercial dual-use: substance-abuse testing, the 97-compound panel
25:00 The heat map: reading opioid and health risk by region
29:00 Advice for transitioning veterans
31:00 Veterans taking care of veterans
33:00 How to reach Mike
Resources:
Other resources:
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/govconunscriptedpod/
🔹 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61593788076719
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 JOIN OUR #govcon #community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
Never Just a Business Leader | Dr. Sarbari Gupta
She could have become a full-time executive years ago. She refused to stop being an engineer.
Twenty-five years later, that choice still shapes the company.
Dr. Sarbari Gupta founded Electrosoft in 2001, walking away from a steady job with nothing else lined up. Twenty-five years later the company runs around 200 employees, and she is still a technologist at heart. In this conversation with host Chelsea Roberts, she covers the leap that started it all, winning early contracts on relationships rather than pedigree, learning GovCon accounting from scratch, the difference between RMF/ATO and Zero Trust, pursuing CMMC Level 2 as a cybersecurity firm, learning to delegate, and the two things she has never been willing to hand off: the customer relationships, and her own connection to the technology.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:01 From electrical engineering to cybersecurity
01:00 The leap of faith: founding Electrosoft in 2001
02:30 Early challenges: GovCon accounting and learning to sell
03:30 Why federal — PKI, NIST and NSA connections
05:00 Has the compliance load grown? CMMC and FISMA
08:00 RMF/ATO vs. Zero Trust, explained
11:00 Barriers, focus, and growth
12:30 Scaling and the mid-2025 rebound
14:30 Learning to delegate at ~200 employees
16:00 The two things she will never hand off
18:00 Staying a technologist, and betting on AI
20:30 What is next for Electrosoft
22:00 Where to find Dr. Gupta and Electrosoft
Resources:
Other resources:
• Resources page on Electrosoft’s website
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/govconunscriptedpod/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 JOIN OUR #govcon #community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
Stop Running Your Company from Your Checking Account | Bud McDonald
Your bank account cannot tell you what next month looks like. A forecast can. Bud McDonald has spent 35 years proving the difference is the whole ballgame.
Most small business owners manage by their bank balance. Bud McDonald, founder of McMay Business Services, spent more than three decades leading turnarounds, managing P&Ls, and running large teams before he started helping small businesses do the one thing that separates the ones that grow from the ones that stall: see their money before it arrives.
In this episode, Bud and Chelsea get into the 13-week cash flow forecast, why a four-page business plan beats no plan, the receivables conversation every founder dreads, how to price the outcome instead of the hour, and the real signal that tells you when it is time to make your first hire. Practical, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of thing nobody hands you when you start a company.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:00 35 years of turnarounds, and why Bud started McMay
02:00 The business plan that fits on four pages
03:00 Budget, forecast, and the 13-week cash flow
04:00 The bank-balance trap
06:00 Chelsea’s spreadsheet lesson
07:00 Bookkeeping as the foundation
08:00 QuickBooks, Wave, and picking a scalable tool
10:00 The mistake behind most turnarounds: processes nobody uses
13:00 A turnaround story: communication first
20:00 Receivables, and the conversation nobody wants
22:00 When to fire a customer
25:00 Pricing: value your time, then price the outcome
30:00 There is no magic number for your first hire
34:00 Working on the business vs in the business
36:00 Where to find Bud
Resources:
Other resources:
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/govconunscriptedpod/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 JOIN OUR #govcon #community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
The Capital Stacking Playbook: How Defense Founders Fund Hard Tech Without Losing Equity | Mollie Jahner
Hard tech is hard, and the money you raise to build it can quietly decide which customers you are allowed to serve. This week on GovCon Unscripted, Mollie Jahner makes the case that most defense founders reach for venture capital by reflex, when a stacked strategy of non-dilutive federal, state, and local funding, plus smart teaming, gets them further with more control.
Host Chelsea Roberts sits down with Mollie Jahner (Mission Cultivate, founder of Raise, formerly founder/CEO of Spring & Forge) on capital stacking, why the wrong investor can trip a CFIUS or foreign-ownership review and block your end customer, how teaming unlocks solicitations a single company cannot reach alone, and where Raise fits in helping founders find non-dilutive money faster.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why working moms make great operators
3:00 Getting government and industry in the same room
6:00 Founding Mission Cultivate and the Raise platform
10:00 Teaming and consortia: unlocking bigger contracts
13:00 The capital stack: non-dilutive funding beyond VC
15:00 The VC trap and the wrong kind of capital
18:00 Why human relationships beat AI noise
21:00 Who Mission Cultivate serves and the Raise launch
26:00 Wrap-up
Resources:
Other resources:
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/govconunscriptedpod/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 JOIN OUR #govcon #community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
The Money Isn’t Where You Think: How to Read Federal Contract Data | Eileen Kent
Everyone reaches for the free federal databases. Almost nobody reads them correctly, and the wrong read sends a whole pursuit in the wrong direction.
In this week’s episode of GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sat with Eileen Kent, the Federal Sales Guide and President of Custom Keynotes, LLC, who has pulled the SAM ad hoc report thousands of times over twenty years.
She walks through the free public data that most contractors misread: why “place of performance” often shows the vendor’s address or the manufacturer’s plant instead of where the work lands, why “dollars obligated” is the only money figure worth trusting, why a string of negatives is usually an adjustment rather than a vendor being pushed out, and how to hunt for patterns of who buys what you sell from whom.
She makes the case that AI and paid aggregators can accelerate a bad decision because they cannot interpret dirty data, and that the deal is still closed in the field, through relationships. She closes on the discipline she cares about most: a real bid/no-bid process, and the strength to walk away when there is no relationship.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro · 01:00 The Three-Step Program
02:30 Early tools (FPDS, USASpending, FedBizOpps, CCR)
06:30 Free vs paid · 07:30 The place-of-performance problem
12:00 Inside the SAM ad hoc report
15:00 Reading patterns (DHA, VA VISNs, CMOPs)
20:00 The 2025 shift of commodities to GSA
23:00 Why outreach bots fail
28:30 Dollars obligated and negative adjustments
33:00 Bid/no-bid discipline.
Resources:
Other Resource:
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/govconunscriptedpodcast/
🔹 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/govconunscriptedpod/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 JOIN OUR #govcon #community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
The $50M Company That Almost Couldn’t Be Sold | Robert E. Jones
A $50 million company with 600 employees almost fell out of its own sale. Not because of revenue, but because every decision still ran through two people.
Most owners think exit planning starts when they call an M&A advisor. In this episode of GovCon Unscripted, host Chelsea Roberts talks with Robert E. Jones, CPA and Principal Advisor at Corvata, who has spent 20+ years in government contracting, and says that by then the value of the business is already fixed. The real work happens two to five years earlier, left of the transaction, where structure, discipline, and decision flow still can be changed.
In this conversation, Robert breaks down his Enterprise Readiness Operating Model, the seven decision failure modes that stall companies, why owner-dependency scares off buyers, and how tightening operations can move an EBITDA multiple from the low end of a 6 to 9x range to the high end. He also shows how tools most contractors already pay for can cut a 12-hour payroll run to two or three hours.
Timestamps:
00:00 Does anyone actually plan the exit?
01:00 “You will exit your business”: on your terms or not
02:00 Left of the transaction: where value is still changeable
03:00 The Enterprise Readiness Operating Model (structure, discipline, decision flow)
06:00 The seven decision failure modes
11:00 Due diligence: documents that “magically appear”
13:00 The $50M company that almost couldn’t be sold
20:00 Policy vs procedure vs work instructions
21:00 Getting off paper: SharePoint, Planner, and the tools you already own
25:00 Value growth: profitability, the multiplier, and the multiple
29:00 The 10-year math: working backward from the day you want out
33:00 The three kinds of optionality this work buys you
Resources:
Follow Robert E. Jones
Follow Chelsea Roberts
Other resources:
Design-Time vs. Runtime AI in Government: Why Most Agencies Get It Backwards | Doug Averill
Your AI pilot probably isn’t failing because the model is weak. It’s failing because you pointed it at the wrong end of the process.
Doug Averill has spent half his career in government and half in technology, and now serves as Vice President, Global Industry Market Leader, Government at Pega. In this episode of GovCon Unscripted, he draws a line most modernization teams never think to draw: the difference between runtime AI (burning tokens to execute the process you already run) and design-time AI (reimagining the process from the source policy before you build anything).
Apply AI at runtime to a broken workflow, Doug argues, and you pave the cow path: you carry the skipped steps, the noncompliance, and the suboptimal outcomes straight into the new system, only faster. He and Chelsea get into why the fix starts with the source policy document rather than the current application, why the power users have to be in the room from the first pilot, why procurement belongs at ideation and not at the end, and why speed, from OTAs to fast pilots, is never the same thing as the outcome you actually needed.
Timestamps:
- 00:01 — Why the US is now leading on AI uptake while process and policy slow everyone down
- 00:04 — Context is the ceiling: why the smallest gap derails an AI tool
- 00:11 — Blueprint for Government, source policy, and paving the cow path
- 00:13 — Design-time AI vs. token-maxing runtime AI
- 00:16 — Local models, warrants, and where a contracting officer should focus
- 00:24 — Dropping point solutions on the front porch of IT
- 00:25 — Getting procurement, CISO, and ISOs in the room to go idea-to-live in 90 days
Resources:
Doug Averill’s LinkedIn profile
Chelsea Roberts’ LinkedIn profile
Other resources:
You Don’t Control Innovation. You Manage It. | Harlan Bennett & Rick Fernandez
Kodak’s own engineers built the first digital camera, and its executives shelved it to protect film. The gap between having ideas and managing innovation is where organizations quietly die.
In this special episode of GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sits down with two of the people writing the international playbook for innovation management. Rick Fernandez is President of the American Network for Innovation, chairman of the US technical advisory group to ISO TC 279, and a veteran of Florida Power & Light’s Deming Prize win, the first awarded outside Japan. Harlan Bennett is CEO of Ever Evolving, Inc., VP of the American Network for Innovation, and vice chair of the same US advisory group.
Together they take apart the most common misreads in federal innovation: that innovation equals technology, that more ideas mean more innovation, and that a standard is just another compliance flow-down. Rick contrasts idea-driven programs (14,000 employee ideas collected, roughly 100 developed, 13,900 contributors alienated) with value-driven innovation that starts from strategic intent. Harlan shows SBIR performers how to escape the one-lane trap by validating adjacent customers before the build starts. And both make the case that ISO 56001, built on the same harmonized structure as ISO 9001, is a management system, not a control system.
They also preview what’s next: innovation ecosystem management, IP-sharing contracts between primes and subs, and why innovation is no longer an individual game.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Welcome and guest introductions
01:00 Harlan Bennett: Ever Evolving, Inc. and the American Network for Innovation
02:30 Rick Fernandez: from FPL’s Deming Prize to ISO TC 279
04:00 Why innovation needs standards now: the three S’s
07:00 Innovation is not a technology: something new that creates value
09:30 The garage tinkerer problem and the one hit wonder
11:00 Managing innovation vs controlling it
12:00 Idea-driven vs value-driven innovation: the 14,000 ideas story
14:30 Innovation portfolio management
18:45 SBIR: escaping the one-lane trap
23:30 The recipe: maximize value, minimize risk, resources, and time
24:45 Ambidextrous organizations: innovating without dropping daily operations
25:30 Case study: an innovation management office, 100 projects narrowed to 3
29:00 Ecosystems: innovation is no longer an individual game
31:00 Primes, flow-downs, CMMC, and fair negotiations
37:45 Standards as enablers, not regulations
39:30 The harmonized structure: why ISO 9001 shops are halfway there
42:15 Where to find Harlan and Rick
Resources:
Harlan Bennett’s LinkedIn Profile
Rick Fernandez’s LinkedIn Profile
Chelsea Roberts’ LinkedIn Profile
Other resources:
Manufacturing Is Not a Dirty Word: Reframing the Jobs Rural Communities Need | Chrissy Marrucci
Say the word manufacturing and a lot of people picture something old and dirty. For rural communities, Chrissy Marucci argues, it is something else entirely: jobs and the federal dollars that come with them.
On this Special Episode of GovCon Unscripted, host Chelsea Roberts continues the #RoadtoHUBZone series with Chrissy Marucci, President and CEO of Elevated Consulting & Development.
Chrissy lives in an entire HUBZone county in the mountains of Appalachia and has spent years connecting rural residents to real federal contracting careers. She and Chelsea talks about what HUBZone was designed to do (bring federal spending back into the communities that need it), why the program is about the place and the people rather than the owner, how the 35% employee-residency rule actually works, and why manufacturing deserves a serious rethink as a source of rural jobs. She also lays out the community development corporation she is building to keep that money at home.
2026 National HUBZone Conference, July 21 and 22 (golf outing July 20) at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and who Chrissy is
01:00 Elevated Consulting and Council back-office support
02:00 An entire HUBZone county in Appalachia
03:00 Building the HUBZone Workforce Program
05:00 What HUBZone does for rural areas
06:00 Manufacturing and construction in rural HUBZones
09:00 Advocacy, land use, and changing the narrative
10:00 Manufacturing is not a dirty word
15:30 Place-based and employee-based: the 35% rule
18:00 Remote work and unlocking rural talent
19:00 The community development corporation
21:00 Conference mode and see you in Chantilly
Resources:
- Chrissy Marucci’s LinkedIn Profile
- Chelsea Robert’s LinkedIn Profile
- Elevated Consulting & Development’s Website
Other resources:
- Holler to Hilltop (community development)
- HUBZone Contractors National Council
- 2026 National HUBZone Conference (register)
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/govconunscriptedpodcast/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 Join our #govcon community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/
Same Work, Different Words: Why Federal Contractors Misread State and Local | Jonathan Santana
A multimillion-dollar services contract, awarded in two weeks, with every I dotted and every T crossed. It was not federal, and that is exactly the point.
This week on GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sits down with Jonathan Santana, founder and lead consultant of Excelsior Consulting Services, LLC, an SBA HUBZone and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned small business supporting federal, state, local, nonprofit, and commercial clients. Jonathan earned his contracting warrant in the Air Force in 2003, bought through hurricane prep at Langley Air Force Base, deployed to Balad Air Base in Iraq in 2005 as a contingency contracting officer, and later worked procurement at Miami-Dade County before founding his own firm.
The conversation covers the translation problem between federal, state, and local buying (acquisition becomes procurement becomes purchasing, while the terms and conditions stay nearly one to one), how NASPO ValuePoint works as a state-level analog to a GWAC or federal supply schedule, what it means to compete with Big Four consultancies that have pivoted to state and local, creative contracting inside the FAR (performance work statements over statements of work, FAR 13.5 procedures), why state and local can award in weeks when the incentive exists, and forensic governance, Jonathan’s discipline of getting adversarial with program data before leadership bets on it.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro and Excelsior Consulting Services
00:02 The verbiage gap: federal vs state and local
00:03 NASPO ValuePoint and entering state markets through a multi-contractor alliance
00:07 Competing with the Big Four at the state and local level
00:10 A contracting warrant at Langley: hurricane prep on the clock
00:11 Deployed at Balad Air Base: contingency contracting in Iraq
00:14 SF-44s, purchase cards, and buying under pressure
00:19 Creative contracting inside the FAR: PWS vs SOW, FAR 13.5
00:23 How fast state, local, and nonprofit buying really moves
00:27 What is forensic governance?
00:31 AI, governance, and decision risk
00:35 Where to find Jonathan
Resources:
Other resources:
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Website
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Instagram
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Company LinkedIn Profile
🎧 Listen now on:
🔹 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/govcon-unscripted/id1766384482
🔹 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NL0kFAvmgECLTJpUZYNHy
Like and follow us:
🔹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GovConUnscriptedUS
🔹 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/govconunscriptedpodcast/
🔹 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/govcon-unscripted/posts/
🔹 Join our #govcon community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14618490/