| CEO Spotlight, Dave Amsler, Foreground Security | |
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By Dave Liss | September 21, 2010 Dave Amsler is the founder and chief information officer of Foreground Security, which has offices in Reston, Va. and in Florida. Recently ranked No. 18 among Inc. magazine's "500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in North America," Foreground has seen its revenues grow by more than 8,000 percent over the past three years. Today, most of the company's business comes from government work, but Amsler is pushing to expand its private-sector contracts.Amsler recently spoke with dctechsource.com about his company, its growth and its future. Here's what he had to say, edited for brevity. What does Foreground Security do and what markets do you serve? Foreground Security was founded almost 11 years ago as an IT security engineering and architecture company. At the time the company was a small player in the field for a select group of services. The company grew organically from an engineering company with specific skill sets and quality of service in three main areas - security architecture and engineering; risk assessment and customized role-based IT security training. Can you describe those areas a little more? Security architecture and engineering. In this service area, the clientele includes large federal agencies including The departments of Defense, Health & Human Services (HHS), Commerce and Agriculture. For HHS a complete redesign was made of their security architecture from scratch. This design included the challenge that all healthcare information was to be structured to be completely accessible in electronic format. Other specific design considerations dealt with today’s current threat vectors or attack methods, including security concerns around Web 2.0 and possible targeted future attacks. Risk assessment. Foreground is hired to attempt to break into computer networks and banking applications legally to ensure that appropriate security controls are in place and that their systems are secure. For several sensitive, very high profile private companies (that) support some of the wealthiest people in the world, we are their security arm. Customized role based IT security training. One-size-fits-all IT security awareness training works well for some organizations, while others need customized training for different employee roles in an organization. Developing role-based training is something we have done for many government organizations and corporations. This focus goes to my biggest pet peeve in industry. Far to often, organizations fail by neglecting to secure the user and most importantly no one bothers to educate them properly. How would you characterize the technology business environment in the DC metro area? The DC area is an amazingly fertile area for business, especially in the security sector. We expect our business to quadruple over the next two years. There is just no comparison between the business environments here as compared to other parts of the country where the same opportunities do not exist. How has the economic downturn affected Foreground Security and your partner/client organizations? We have successfully bucked the negative trends of the economic downturn and have been able to grow during this tough business climate. Security is an area where both government and commercial organizations are still spending a lot of money. We expect that our largest area of growth for the next 12 months will most likely be in the commercial sector. What was your biggest business challenge in the last 12 months? As we grow, our company faces a three-part business challenge. We must be able to keep our strong company culture, maintain the high levels of customer service we give our clients and bring new people into the company with the same mindset. There have been some hiccups and ethical issues that we have had to deal as we have grown but we have gotten past those without too much damage to the core principles of the company. We want people on our team with the same mindset, ideals and sense of corporate culture that I have. What has been your biggest success over the last year? Our biggest success has been our ability to grow and still keep our same high level of skill and service. For HHS, in a year and a half, we helped redesigned their security architecture from scratch. This agency is the largest civilian department of the federal government. Our work includes system changes that reflect the agency’s new responsibilities from recently passed health care reform legislation. How do you define security and what is the biggest misperception about how many companies consider security? Security is a never-ending cycle. It is not a static environment. Organizations always need to detect, protect and respond in a constantly changing environment. Security structures must detect issues that have not been prevented and create new measures to correct what did not work. How did you come to start Foreground Security? I started my career doing consulting for General Electric. I became certified in Six Sigma and other leadership and management programs. For another company I became a vice president and got involved in security services. Eventually I decided to go out on my own and decided to create what later became Foreground Security. This slow beginning really helped build the foundation for our success today because it gave us the time to form our strong level of services, reputation, and corporate culture. It is only in the last three years that the company has really grown. The business climate of today has provided a great fertile ground for making the company successful. Our clients have given us the opportunity to refine our capabilities, services and engineering strength. Why did you decide to keep the titles "founder and CIO" instead of CEO or another title? I am an engineer. I like to be involved with technology and involved with customers as much as possible. Will it be like this forever? No, but I do enjoy the work and the customers love it. Engineering is a passion for me and I love to be involved with technology and our projects. Inc. magazine places you at No.18 on their "500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in North America" list with a 3-year growth rate of 8,290 percent. What accounts for this rate of growth? It is not feasible to think that a company can continue to grow at this rate. We have a great team, great offerings in a fertile business climate for security services. We have been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. The word is getting out. We recently hired a COO and an EVP of sales and marketing who both have experience growing and running highly successful IT security entities for larger organizations and companies. Will our 2010 numbers be better than last year’s numbers? Yes. Will we be on the Inc list next year? Yes. Could we be on the Inc list 10 years from now? Probably not. What are your primary responsibilities with Foreground Security? I maintain a variety of roles in the company. For about 90 percent of our customers I provide high-level project decisions and input as to what their systems and architecture should look like. Our customers love that. My portfolio includes a lot of CIO-type stuff. I manage project teams; direct the vice president of marketing and sales for the company; manage inside operations and determine how we should serve and grow various markets. Utilities and healthcare are two major growth markets for us coming up. How would you characterize your leadership style? I treat employees and engineers like I wished I had been treated. I let them do their job. I don’t micromanage. I let them succeed. As long as the work is getting done, it’s fine with me if you want to work all night and sleep all day. One of the main reasons we have become successful is because I understand that it is our company’s employees and engineers that have allowed us to be successful. I give profit sharing to all our employees every year. How would you describe the Foreground Security culture? We have a team-oriented culture. People always comment on our team atmosphere. Every potential new person when they come in for an interview, they meet with the team. The team makes the final decision as to whether a person joins our company or not. I learned from my father-in-law, never say that a person works "for" me. Always say that that a person works "with" me. I treat every person this way. How do you identify, motivate and prepare people to move up? I always try to understand each individual’s career goals, "Where do you want to go and how can I help you get there." Some engineers just want to work on an interesting project, so I try to place them in challenging projects. For most successful people if you give them a path, an avenue, and if they want to accomplish something, they will. If someone wants to grow into management positions we outline a path together for them to achieve this goal. Your company was in the "capture the flag" contest at DEFCON 18 (hacking conference) this year. How did you do? We finished in 6th place this year. There are 540 teams that qualify and a learning curve to work through to be able to be competitive. It takes three months to qualify for a competition that takes three days. This effort goes to show that we have some pretty skilled team members. I was fully behind our team. I was at the competition and Foreground paid for everything for our team during the time they were there. We don’t’ have a standard corporate culture. This effort is part of the secret sauce that keeps our employees motivated. Because I am an engineer I know how engineers tick and what motivates people |
