George Batsakis had done enough deals to be suspicious of the arithmetic. In July 2022, as he and his business partner Jerad Speigel brought three businesses under the Groundswell name, the familiar promise hovered nearby: put companies together and the result will exceed the sum of the parts. Batsakis had participated in roughly a dozen deals and had been acquired himself. Experience had made him cautious about that particular piece of business mathematics.
He said they were treating the combination like a merger. That approach carried an obligation. Telesto Group, CollabraLink Technologies, and Groundswell Consulting Group were becoming a shared enterprise. People who had worked inside separate businesses would have to find reasons to work together. A transaction could arrange the ownership. The daily running of the company would determine what that ownership was worth.
That is a useful place to begin with Batsakis, now Groundswell’s chief executive. His career runs through military service, large government contractors, a cloud-services business, and a company assembled with private equity backing. Along the way, his responsibilities have included operations, growth, strategy, and execution. The verbs matter. They describe someone whose work continues after the presentation has ended and the visiting advisers have gone home.
An infantry officer learns the systems business
Batsakis studied political science at Hillsdale College in Michigan. His next chapter took him through the U.S. Army’s Officer Candidate School and into service as an infantry officer. He also held command and staff positions in the Army National Guard. Government would become the customer for much of his professional life; first, it had been an institution in which he served.
His education subsequently acquired a more quantitative dimension. At Johns Hopkins University, he completed a master’s degree in business, with a specialization in operations research and systems analysis. He also earned a program management certification in acquisition management from the Defense Systems Management College and attended executive education programs at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Politics, operations, systems, procurement: the combination fits the work that followed.
Early industry roles included Teledyne and Electronic Data Systems, with responsibilities around information technology, communications, networking, and logistics. By April 2006, Northrop Grumman had appointed him vice president of force protection and communications operations in its Tactical Systems Division. These were assignments in the machinery of defense contracting, where an organization’s ability to deliver matters alongside its ability to sell.
He joined SRA International in 2007. His leadership responsibilities there expanded across defense and national security work. Later came the chief growth officer position at CSRA, followed by leadership of the defense and intelligence portfolio at Accenture Federal Services. The sequence supplied experience in different parts of the same difficult undertaking: understanding an agency’s needs, assembling a response, winning the work, and managing the organization responsible for it.
The appeal of a different delivery model
In January 2020, 1901 Group announced Batsakis as its executive vice president and chief strategy officer. The business had a particular proposition: cloud-delivered managed services, supported from an enterprise operations center in Blacksburg, Virginia. Technology partnerships and workforce development were part of its approach. Batsakis arrived to help with strategy and expansion, bringing experience from much larger government technology organizations.
The attraction he described was specific. He pointed to the company’s commitment to cloud services, cybersecurity, technology partners, and the workforce needed to deliver them. Those interests would remain recognizable at Groundswell. His career was moving through different corporate settings, but a recurring question was taking shape: how could commercial technology and a workable delivery organization meet the demands of public-sector customers?
That June, he joined a CNBC discussion on automation and the Internet of Things. His fellow participants included Otis executive Neil Green and New York City technology official Alexis Wichowski. The setting put his government contracting experience alongside the concerns of industry and city administration. Technology had to be considered together with the people and organizations expected to use it.
A name borrowed, a company to build
By the end of 2021, Batsakis and Speigel were working with Washington Harbour Partners on a new venture. Telesto was the first acquisition; CollabraLink followed, and Groundswell Consulting Group completed the initial combination in July 2022. The partners were pursuing a place in the middle of the federal technology market, with capabilities spanning enterprise systems, digital transformation, and low-code application development.
The third acquisition supplied the shared name. CollabraLink adopted Groundswell as the identity for the combined organization. Batsakis’s explanation contained a pleasingly ordinary admission amid the launch language: “We found the answer right under our nose.” Naming exercises can become elaborate affairs. In this case, the answer arrived with the business they were buying.
The technical fit was part of the rationale. Groundswell Consulting Group brought Appian expertise to a combination already working in enterprise technology and digital services. Its founders, Blake Templeman, Eric Grinnalds, and Justin Watts, stayed as investors and operating executives. The people who had built the acquired business would help run the larger one. That gave the integration a measure of continuity.
“But we are treating this like a merger.”
George Batsakis, July 2022
A shared brand still needed a shared organization behind it. In August 2022, Groundswell brought in Megan Hanik as chief people officer, with a remit covering culture, employee development, and an integrated human resources strategy. Batsakis publicly emphasized the importance of a connected workplace. The timing is revealing: soon after the new name came an appointment concerned with how people would experience the company carrying it.
The branding work had its own practical assignment. Leaders from the three businesses took part in discovery interviews as the new identity was developed. The resulting language emphasized seismic change. It was a vigorous metaphor for an enterprise whose work often takes place inside budgets, workflows, and back-office systems. An earthquake makes a memorable slogan. Running the combined business would require considerably more precision.
Begin where the boxes are
For a more concrete view of Batsakis’s interests, consider the warehouse. In April 2023, he published an essay arguing that federal supply-chain modernization should begin there. He described commercial warehousing technologies, including connected devices, scanning, and automated storage and retrieval, and connected those developments to enterprise resource planning systems. His subject was the point at which digital records and physical goods have to agree.
His argument had a sequence. Warehousing can become an afterthought in a broader modernization effort. Begin with a better-equipped warehouse, he proposed, and it can become a foundation for the supply chain around it. Commercial businesses had already accumulated relevant experience. Government could learn from that work while adapting it to federal requirements.
There is a practical temperament in choosing that subject. The warehouse is a place of space, movement, inventory, and handoffs. An attractive system diagram eventually has to answer a stubborn question: where is the thing? Batsakis used the essay to make a business case for Telesto’s SAP capabilities, but the underlying interest is clear. He was discussing technology through the operation it needed to improve.
- 01Improve the warehouseStorage, retrieval, visibility
- 02Connect the systemsEnterprise resource planning
- 03Support the supply chainFrom suppliers to consumption
The ordinary working day
By June 2024, Groundswell and Workday were announcing a deployment at a federal agency with an international mission and global workforce. The agency, unnamed in the announcement, was replacing an older on-premises personnel database with Workday Government Cloud. Thousands of employees would be able to access and manage their own data, while managers received tools to maintain their organizations.
CrossVue was the implementation partner. Batsakis also pointed to a recent Workday award at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The significance of the announced deployment lay in what staff could do afterward: handle information directly, with fewer responsibilities concentrated in an old personnel database. Here was an everyday use for the enterprise systems work behind the broader transformation language.
Groundswell’s budget software offers another view of that work. Its Integrated Budget Suite, built on Appian, connects stages including strategy, formulation, planning, execution, and reporting. The company describes functions such as scenario planning, expenditure tracking, reconciliation, and dashboards. These are the administrative connections that allow a budget to remain understandable as it moves from an intention to money being spent.
The logistics thread continues in AMMO, Groundswell’s ammunition management solution. Its advertised scope includes traceability from receipt through residue turn-in, with connections across enterprise, finance, and logistics systems. For a former infantry officer whose industry career included communications and logistics, the subject sits within a long professional history. The public product descriptions explain the work the company is pursuing; they do not, by themselves, measure its results.
In March 2026, Batsakis described his priority as commercial software adapted to federal missions, with attention to adoption, security, compliance, and sustained operation. The ambition follows the earlier chapters closely. A platform has to fit an agency’s responsibilities. An organization has to be able to deploy it. The useful life of the software has to extend beyond its introduction.
Four generations, one roof
There is a smaller, warmer detail in his 2026 account. During the previous year, Batsakis had become a grandfather twice. Over the holidays, four generations gathered under his roof. After the job titles and corporate combinations, it is a welcome glimpse of a life measured in something other than contracts and capabilities.
His public career has involved bringing systems, organizations, and people into working relationships. Groundswell is the latest substantial expression of that work: three businesses, a borrowed name, retained founders, and a continuing effort to make the combination useful. The family gathering needs no such explanation. Four generations in one house is a different kind of togetherness, and a good place to leave the arithmetic alone.