In 1986, systems engineer Alison Brown created a technology consulting firm
that she operated out of a bedroom in her house in Colorado Springs. This
year, her company, Navsys Corp., will do nearly $10 million in sales, but
she still has enough perspective to call it a company in its “uncomfortable
teenage years.”
Little Navsys almost didn’t make it past its first contract to build a
global-positioning system to track the Air Force’s weather balloons.
Brown landed in Colorado Springs after graduate school and decided to start her business. Soon, Brown and her two employees
had just won their first big project, worth $500,000 over two years. But
through her ignorance of government contracting, she did not realize that
buried in the fixed price contract’s massive fine print was a clause that
withheld 15 percent of payment until the end of the contract.
