Swafford soon realized just how important that business plan would be when he had to go back and read through it again two years later following his nomination for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

“I had to go look at revenues and how we went, and my one page PowerPoint slide showed our revenue path…it was exactly where we were, just by complete chance that I predicted that. I had some predictions, as far as I knew what my current bookings were and I knew what my backlog was, but I didn’t know what the growth was actually going to be,” he recalled.

“It was right spot on, to the month, to the hundreds of dollars.”

In addition to forcing him to create a business plan, the I²C provided instant credibility to the startup.

“People would come in and we’d meet here and come upstairs to the conference room and the first thing they’d want is a tour of the facility. Every meeting got derailed for the first 15 minutes and I got used to it…they’d want to know what this is, why it’s here, what’s it all about, and how’d it get here,” Swafford said, adding that he’s given that tour to “everybody who’s ever come to meet here.”

“It has the look and feel of a technology hub. You’ve got all the other businesses here that bring credibility to it, like Accenture, SAIC, and Intuitive. They’re all well-known companies here. By operating in a space that they’re in, that brings subconscious credibility, subconscious bias maybe, and, you know, you look professional.”

In addition to the overall optics of the facility and ready access to private meeting spaces, Swafford made good use of the access to different networks that I²C provides. “If I had a problem, I’d come ask Rigved ‘hey, I’m trying to figure this out, I don’t know who to talk to’–he’d give me about 3-5 different people to reach out to every time.”

“These folks, they’ve been through this or they know who to talk to to help me. And sure enough, every time they’d help me get to my solution.”

“If I could really pick my top three entrepreneurs who really leveraged to the max how they could benefit from all the resources we have, I think Jason would be on the top of the list. You know, just the way he utilized the space, he could position his company, make it seem legitimate, as he was growing, to his customers who were not easy to convince,” Joshi added.

And grow, it did. Although Swafford initially wanted to go into some technology fields and work with NASA, clients and revenue dictated the path of the business for the first couple of years.

“The opportunity to switch from consulting to government contracting appeared and we were able to do support for Army Aviation, specifically working with modernized crypto. We still have

a technology focus, but it’s a split between logistics and technology support that we still do now for Army Aviation. Once we started into that, that’s when we had our explosive growth,” Swafford said.

By the spring of 2020, Swafford had jumped from consulting to government contracting.

“Those discussions obviously started months in advance because it takes months to get a contract up and going or to get added to contracts. So I was one person but I had a couple of part time help[ers] when I was doing consulting.” With his client list growing rapidly, the company quickly expanded to five people.

“Later that year we were doing good work–we were a good subcontractor to our client and together we managed our contract well. We were responsive to them and we had the opportunity to add some more positions, and then we added two more in the next six months”.

By the fall of 2020, the company added three additional positions. Since then, Swafford has had to hire a business manager, then a director of strategy and growth, and most recently, an executive administrative assistant.

“We’re 3 ½ years old…we basically doubled in revenue every year.”

JS Solutions also recently won a $46 billion IDIQ contract with the U.S. Air Force.

“This is the one that made us famous for a day,” Swafford quipped.

The IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity Contract) is a top-level contract where the government brings in multiple awardees, which prequalifies companies to generate competition for specific types of work.

“We won a position with the Air Force on EWAAC (Eglin Wide Agile Acquisition Contract),” Swafford explained. “It’s out of Eglin, Florida, and it’s a $46 billion ceiling, ten-year ordering period…what that means is we won a seat at the table to compete against all of the task orders that will come out on that IDIQ. We are the smallest company sitting at that table.”

Swafford described this as a huge milestone for the company, which required them to assemble a team and lead it to go after the contract. “A lot of the companies that we asked to team with us really weren’t tracking this. Like, they did initial awardees of this in, I think, September of 2021. A month later they announced they were going to do a second on-ramp of companies because they wanted a broader mix of competition. All the traditional contracting companies kind of went after the big companies to do things…all the top five are in there.”

He noted that a lot of companies weren’t tracking that there was another on-ramping taking place. “It kind of came quietly…a lot of folks just kind of blew it off. Well, we happened to be paying attention and we were like ‘hey, we can do this. We qualify for this. So we went after it. Which forced us to do some things internally in the foundation of the company. It forced us to verify that we had a government-approved accounting process, which is a big deal with

government contracting. You have to be legitimate and look like a low-risk possible prime to be awarded a seat at one of these tables.”

JS Solutions has since acquired its GSA schedule, another prime contract with the government that allows the company to bid on additional items. “We shock a lot of folks all the time–I say we fight above our weight class. We’re a small company that’s not the traditional small business contractor in town…I’ve got a good team wit a mix of abilities and we’ve done big things like this in previous organizations, working in a big company with a big company’s resources behind us. We’re like ‘we can do those same things, we just have to do it a little differently,” Swafford said.

“This sets the stage for us to have explosive growth over the next ten years. One of my goals is that we’re trying to get to be a 30 or 50 person company within 3-5 years from winning that IDIQ…it’s possible, it’s doable–you just have to put the hard work in.”

Joshi noted that Swafford “was one of the very few who was able to see and identify, pinpoint, exploit, and leverage everything that we were trying to build and create for one-man entrepreneurs like he was.” Returning to the topic of churn, he explained that exits for the I²C included its resident companies failing, being acquired, or going IPO.

“But there’s a very legitimate exit that we could quantify, which is growth,” he added. “Every time someone asks me ‘have you had any exits,’ I always say we’ve had three so far–[Swafford] was the first one who moved out of the I²C for the right reasons because he grew from one person to 15 people, moved from a 300 square foot office to 3,000 square feet. To us, that’s an exit, and

for our stakeholders that comes as very positive…it checks boxes across various metrics that we track.”

JS Solutions will celebrate its continuing success by cutting the ribbon on its new facility on September 20, which, according to Swafford, adds yet another layer of legitimacy to his company.

Swafford is proud of the fact that in addition to repeated nominations for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award, his company won silver in the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce’s Best Places to Work Awards this year. “That shows we take care of our people and that people want to come work with us. When we’re recruiting and talking to folks, everyone in town pays attention to that. Whether they tell you that or not, they are.”

“Those things keep showing up and happening because we’re putting in the hard work to grow the customer relationship, to grow our employee relationship. If both of those are not happy and they’re not happy together then we’re not going to exist, and the company won’t exist unless the employees and the customers all like each other and want to work together. Now we’re up for Small Business of the Year as a contender, and we’re hopeful that we’ll do well there,” he continued.

Swafford considers the Best Places to Work Award to be the one he cares most about “because that’s our report card from our employees on how we’re doing on taking care of them.”

Although he sees this as the company’s pathway to growth, Swafford noted that the focus isn’t so much on the number of employees as it is its ability to take care of the people within the company. “That’s success…I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of that right there. It’s not just about the growth revenue or the awards. It’s making sure that we stay humble and take care of our people, who will take care of our customers and vice versa. Everything else will kind of take care of itself outside of that.”

Swafford noted that his first office space at the I²C was #320, coincidentally the same number as the office suite in which the company is preparing to open later in September. “I looked at two other offices between when I was getting ready to move out–they were also 320. It was weird. So our next office will have to be 320, I guess.”