Winning the contract was only the beginning of William R. Teel Jr.’s problem. In late 2005, his company and its partner had secured a Department of Energy IT assignment worth more than a billion dollars over seven years. Before the work could move across, there was a financing requirement: a $25 million line of credit. Teel put his house and car behind the deal. A federal contract had acquired a very personal set of keys.
That is an unusually concrete way to encounter the difference between winning business and being able to deliver it. The announcement belongs to the public world of procurement. The collateral belongs to somebody’s driveway. Teel’s account of the deal contains both, with very little space between them.
Today, he is president and CEO of Business Technology Integrators, the company that continues the story of 1 Source Consulting. His career connects places often treated as separate chapters: Anacostia, Bowie State University, the U.S. Army and federal information technology. The connections become easier to see when the story is followed through the people who helped him grow, and the institution to which he later made a substantial promise.
Anacostia, then a place at the table
Teel is a native of Anacostia in Southeast Washington, D.C., and the first member of his family to graduate from college. He earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at Bowie State. He also earned an MBA at Johns Hopkins University and received an Army commission as a second lieutenant through ROTC.
The combination matters to the kind of enterprise he would build. Information technology and management sit beside each other in his education, just as they do in his work. A computer system has technical requirements. An organization has people, budgets and obligations. A contractor has to satisfy all of them while the client carries on with its daily business.
His first job after college was writing software for the Department of Energy. He spent six years there. Later, the agency gave his own business its first contract, for $10,000. These were different positions on the same working relationship: employee, supplier, and eventually a participant in a much larger undertaking.
Bowie State remained part of how he explained his progress. “Bowie State taught me to become an independent thinker,” he said. It is a spare description of an education. No elaborate theory, no personal brand attached. The emphasis falls on being able to make a judgment of one’s own.
“I want to do everything possible to validate the faith the government has placed in my company.”
William R. Teel Jr. · 2006
A small firm, with a larger team
Teel founded 1 Source Consulting in 1999. Its beginnings were in a basement in suburban Washington. Six years later, the company was the majority owner of Energy Enterprise Solutions, a joint venture with RS Information Systems. The venture had formed in late 2004 as part of the Energy Department’s competitive sourcing process.
The arrangement placed a smaller firm in a position that the usual names in federal contracting might have expected to occupy. IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation were among the other contractors on the team. Size did not disappear from the equation. The participants assembled their different capabilities inside a common bid.
There was another significant participant: the Energy Department’s own IT workforce. Federal employees were part of the bidding team. For a project involving a change in how work was supplied, the people already doing that work were part of the proposed answer.
The scope was extensive. It included enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, applications, telecommunications, network operations, desktop management and user support. A list like that can look dry until a desktop stops working. Then user support becomes the most interesting item in the room.
The seven-year award was reported in November 2005. Its billion-dollar scale described a contract extending over time, across a joint venture and a team. Keeping those distinctions in view makes the achievement more intelligible: Teel had helped organize the means to take on a large assignment.
A seven-year DOE IT award to the joint venture.
Majority ownerRS Information Systems
Joint-venture partnerDOE IT workforce
Part of the bidding team
Growth comes with a payroll
The expansion can also be seen at the level of Teel’s original company. In 2006, 1 Source Consulting ranked 15th in the Fast 50, with 52 employees and revenue of about $486,000 in 2001 and $8.63 million in 2005. Its listed customers included Energy, Justice, Homeland Security, Education and the General Services Administration.
These are figures from that period, when the firm was building its place in government IT. They give the basement beginning some proportion. A company with dozens of employees must already coordinate work, answer to customers and keep commitments to people who depend on its payroll. Taking on a much larger contract raises the stakes of those ordinary duties.
By early 2007, Energy Enterprise Solutions had 600 employees and locations in 19 states. The venture and 1 Source together had generated nearly $80 million in revenue in 2006. The hiring needed to support the Energy assignment was a further undertaking in its own right.
Teel described his appetite for the decision plainly: “I’m a believer in risk and reward, so I stepped out of my comfort zone and went for it.” The remark carries more weight beside the financing requirement and the growing workforce. There were people to hire and systems to operate after the decision had been made. Risk had an administrative life.
One company’s annual revenue, 2001-2005. These figures are separate from the joint venture’s contract value.
The person on the other side of the partnership
RS Information Systems was led by Rodney P. Hunt. Teel’s account of their relationship included mentoring as well as a business agreement. Hunt had chosen to work with smaller and minority-owned suppliers, and Teel credited that outreach with giving his company opportunities to grow.
Their team agreement also helped 1 Source land a Department of Homeland Security contract of just under $400 million. The Energy venture was therefore part of a wider relationship. One collaboration opened a route to another assignment.
Mentoring can sound almost decorative when it appears in a company biography. Here it had a practical setting: two companies working together, pursuing work and building enough capacity to perform it. Teel’s gratitude to Hunt was explicit. The growth story included somebody else’s decision to take a chance on him.
That acknowledgment gives the later Bowie State chapter its particular resonance. Teel had received an education and a business opportunity. When he gave back to his university, his contribution entered another system through which opportunity could reach other people. The two acts are separated by institutions and years, but they belong comfortably in the same account of his career.
A million dollars, pointed back toward campus
On November 8, 2008, Bowie State launched its five-year, $15 million “Believe, Invest, Grow” fundraising campaign at a black-tie gala. Teel led off with a $1 million pledge. The gift was to establish the William R. Teel Jr. Endowed Scholars Program.
The timing gives the commitment additional context. The campaign began during the financial crisis, when making a substantial financial promise was hardly a routine social gesture. A fundraising gala may have elegant clothes and a carefully arranged program. Its useful business still depends on people agreeing to contribute.
The pledge carried Teel’s name into the university through a scholars program. That is a different relationship from having one’s name on a company. It ties the name to an educational purpose, and returns it to the place where he had studied.
In 2009, his companies provided work for more than 1,600 Marylanders. He was also one of many alumni supporting Bowie State. Those two forms of contribution offer a useful view of a business leader’s relationship with a place. Employment gives people work to carry out and an income. Alumni giving helps a university pursue its educational purpose. Both reach beyond the person whose name appears on the company.
His involvement also included a place on Bowie State’s Board of Visitors in 2008-2009. A pledge is an easily remembered number. A board position adds a less theatrical form of participation: a continuing association with the university and the people working on its future.
Teel’s pledge to launch an endowed scholars program.
A place on the gala page, and a longer place in the university’s story. Bowie State’s 2015 Promise Keeper honoree.
Recognition, and the work that follows
In 2009, the Maryland Chamber of Commerce inducted Teel into its Maryland Business Hall of Fame, identifying him with both 1 Source Consulting and Energy Enterprise Solutions. Bowie State later included him among the recipients of its 2015 Promise Keeper Award, which recognized alumni contributions to the university and their communities.
The two recognitions put different parts of the career in view. The chamber listed the business leader. The alumni award acknowledged contributions beyond the company. Together, they describe the breadth of his public work without requiring a private-life legend to explain it.
The business now carries the name Business Technology Integrators. Teel’s responsibilities remain executive leadership, business affairs, strategic planning and mission success. BTI’s current work includes State Department network modernization at international locations. The company’s history also describes the challenge of moving beyond the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) development program and its subsequent recertification as a small business.
For Teel, the story has moved through several kinds of commitment: education, a company, a joint venture, a financing obligation, a university pledge. The numbers are useful landmarks. They make it possible to see the scale change. The relationships explain how a person gets from one landmark to the next.
Return to that early Energy Department contract, worth $10,000, and the later pledge to Bowie State, worth $1 million. They sit on opposite sides of a career in which institutions gave Teel work and an education, and he returned as a business leader and donor. The distance between those sums is considerable. The places and people connecting them make the distance worth reading about.