Five Questions With Kevin Powderly, CyberCore Technologies

When Kevin Powderly founded CyberCore Technologies nearly five years ago, he had no idea how quickly his company would grow. In fact, the Timonium, Md., government VAR is the third-fastest-growing member on the 2005 VARBusiness 500, where it ranks 194. Powderly shares his insights on managing such a rapidly expanding business.

How has the government business been lately? It has been great. In fact, we can't slow down. We do a lot of work at the federal level with the Department of Homeland Security, and I think CyberCore has been in the right place at the right time to answer some of those IT needs for the agencies.

Are you selective with your approach to federal contracts? Yes. We try to stick with what we're good at. We've had to walk away from a lot of contracts that just didn't make sense for us. Some of the contracts were just too big for us to swallow, even with all of our growth.

How were you able to manage such rapid growth with a young company? My brother, John [also an executive at CyberCore], and I spent a number of years at General Electric, and we learned that you have to have your process road map in place well ahead of time. We saw that projects were getting a lot bigger for us, so we got out in front of a lot of financing companies to make sure we had the capital needed to support the growth, and we invested a lot in our human-resources department to find the right people when we added head count.

Has finding talented, skilled people been hard? It's tough, but we started early. We put together a strong pipeline of candidates by interviewing people before we really needed to hire them. So, we were prepared when the growth really took off. A lot of resellers don't know where to find skilled people when the growth really starts to take off.

What about getting your message across to the banks and venture-capital firms? It's absolutely difficult. But again, we started early, communicated with them on a regular basis, and educated them on our business and the channel from the ground up. They had our road maps and Six Sigma process plans ahead of time, so they always knew where the business was headed. We never promised something that we couldn't deliver.