Mary Clare Gumbleton and the Value of Five Minutes

Five minutes can be a surprisingly expensive unit of time. At a business matchmaking session, it is long enough to deliver a pitch and short enough to discover that nobody is particularly interested. Mary Clare Gumbleton has described the familiar arrangement: a brief conversation, a lengthy wait, then another brief conversation. Her praise for an EAGLE II matchmaking event turned on a small but consequential difference. The companies seemed willing to do business together.

Her compliment was simple: the participants were interested in teaming. There is a whole commercial philosophy inside that modest observation. Attendance is easy to count. Interest is harder to establish. For someone running a small company in the federal market, the difference has consequences well beyond the coffee table.

Gumbleton is the founder, president and CEO of The Wolverine Group in Washington, D.C. Her career has passed through education policy, government communications, the Pentagon and company ownership. Across those settings, the recurring practical problem is how to turn an exchange of information into something people can use. A calendar invitation, a translated message and a prospective partnership all look perfectly respectable on paper. Their value emerges when somebody acts.

A name on the briefing schedule

Before there was a Wolverine Group, there was work inside government. In 1995, Gumbleton was a special assistant for national service at the U.S. Department of Education. That November and December, she took part in an American Youth Policy Forum study mission to England, joining a delegation of 18 policy aides, researchers and practitioners examining youth services, education and employment training.

The itinerary put American visitors in conversation with national and local officials, educators, youth advocates and service providers. The exercise was comparative and concrete: look at how another country organized its work, then consider what that revealed about arrangements at home. Gumbleton appears among the participants, alongside people from government, education and nonprofit organizations. It is an early glimpse of a career conducted across institutional boundaries.

By 2000, she was directing the Department of Education’s Scheduling and Briefing Staff in the Office of the Secretary. The title has none of the glamour of a campaign slogan. It does, however, contain two essentials of public life: deciding when a conversation happens and preparing someone to have it.

A briefing is an editorial act. Someone must decide which details belong in the room. A schedule is an allocation of attention. Read together, those responsibilities offer a useful way into Gumbleton’s later work, where messages, audiences and decisions become the substance of the business. Her government career also included senior communications and management positions at the White House and Treasury.

Business ownership changes the conversation

Gumbleton went on to own and lead ConStrat and to serve as a senior communications adviser to the Defense Department’s Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Those roles placed her on different sides of the same relationship: institutions with missions to carry out, and businesses supplying the expertise to help them.

Her first company grew beyond $30 million in revenue and approached 100 employees in under five years. It recorded 515 percent growth between 2007 and 2010 and appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Those figures belong to her earlier business, a separate chapter from the company she now leads.

Fast growth makes for an attractive sentence. It also changes the scale of the job. Revenue, employees and delivery obligations have to move together. The founder who can persuade a client to buy must also run an organization capable of doing the work. Gumbleton’s career joins communications with that less quotable responsibility: management.

The Wolverine Group was founded in 2011. By 2014, its work included domestic and foreign media analysis, audience assessment, strategic communications and military information operations. Its listed clients included National Defense University, U.S. Central Command and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ public affairs office. The audience for a message might be far removed from the Washington office where the assignment began.

The audience has a language of its own

Wolverine’s communications work brings together analysts with cultural and regional knowledge, people working across languages, and tools for collecting and examining public information. English, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, French, Russian and Chinese were among the languages named in its early capabilities. The work involved relationships between authors, websites, topics and audiences, with information drawn from several kinds of online activity.

It is a particular conception of communication. A message travels through a social setting. Understanding the words is one part of understanding the encounter. Who is speaking, who is listening and what connects them matter too. The tools collect; the analyst must still work out what the collection means.

For Gumbleton, the commercial offering sits at that junction of measurement and messaging. The interesting question comes after publication: what happened? An organization can send material into the world with admirable efficiency and still have little idea whether it reached the people it intended to reach. Counting output is reassuring. Establishing an effect takes more work.

Small groups, large questions

In September 2015, Giving Voice, a network of younger Catholic sisters, invited members into a planning process involving Gumbleton and Carol Zinn, SSJ. The proposed format was intimate: groups of four to six people, speaking for 60 to 75 minutes, over calls scheduled for October, November and December.

The questions concerned the organization’s future and the communications methods needed to support it. Participants were invited to contribute observations, hopes, ideas and suggestions. Their contributions would be brought together to help articulate a vision and communications plan. Here, the assignment began with gathering what the members had to say.

That setting expands the picture of her work. A federal command and a network of sisters have different purposes and vocabularies. Each still faces the problem of hearing people accurately before deciding how to communicate. The small group format gave the discussion room to breathe. Even an organization with a communications plan occasionally needs to stop communicating long enough to listen.

When the buyer needs to listen, too

In May 2016, Gumbleton joined a Department of Homeland Security Reverse Industry Day panel on innovation and the participation of vendors outside the usual government supplier pool. Jonathan Aberman and Richard Beutel were fellow panelists; Dan Chenok moderated. The premise gave industry a turn at explaining its side of the purchasing relationship.

The discussion topics were practical obstacles: how government could reach innovators through partnerships, how new entrants could approach prime contractors, and how requirements such as past performance and compliance affected participation. These are the mechanics behind the cheerful invitation to bring fresh ideas to Washington. An open door still needs a usable entrance.

That August, Gumbleton submitted a public comment on a proposed federal acquisition rule concerning strategic sourcing documentation. She urged the government to keep existing Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative programs while pausing pending and future ones. Her concern was consolidation and its consequences for smaller suppliers. She challenged the evidence and industry feedback underpinning the approach.

The distinction matters: this was her policy argument, made as a business owner participating in the rulemaking process. It showed a willingness to question the purchasing system on which firms like hers depended. A supplier can work hard to understand a government customer and still ask the customer to understand the supplier.

“All the companies actually seemed interested in teaming.”

Mary Clare Gumbleton, on an EAGLE II matchmaking session

A different gathering in Detroit

On July 27, 2023, Gumbleton took part in another kind of public occasion. At Sacred Heart Church in Detroit, a standing-room-only gathering marked the launch of No Guilty Bystander, a biography of her uncle, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton. She and Jerry Gumbleton were among the family members offering reflections.

The gathering brought relatives together with friends, former parishioners, the book’s authors and its publisher. A photograph places Mary Clare among the speakers and choir at the front of the church, facing rows of listeners. In a career often described through institutions and capabilities, the occasion adds something more personal: a niece participating in a public celebration of her uncle’s life and work.

The next draft still needs a decision

Today, Gumbleton leads a woman-owned small business whose work spans information operations, acquisition support, training and software. Wolverine’s procurement practice addresses both acquiring AI capabilities and using AI within the acquisition process. The distinction carries an operational consequence: choosing a technology and learning to work with it require different decisions.

Within her leadership team, Chief Innovation Officer Jaime Gracia directs procurement AI initiatives and develops training for acquisition professionals. Jeanne Gumbleton, director of operations since August 2020, manages workflows and relationships as well as the administrative work that keeps delivery moving. The responsibilities make the organization’s range more legible: technical experimentation, professional instruction and everyday execution.

Gumbleton’s path has covered policy visits, briefing schedules, growing companies, planning calls and procurement debates. The settings change, but the test remains recognizably practical. Did the conversation reveal something? Can the people involved do something with it? At the matchmaking session she praised, the answer was promising enough to earn a compliment. For a business built around communication, five useful minutes are a respectable place to begin.