A Conversation With: Kim Doering

Kim Doering is USA’s Vice President, Huntsville Operations, and is the company’s senior executive in Alabama. Doering joined USA in May 2008 after serving as NASA’s Deputy Program Manager for Space Shuttle at the Johnson Space Center. Doering’s primary focus in Huntsville is to develop new business opportunities in that market. In this issue, Doering discusses those potential opportunities.

UPDATE: You’ve been with USA for almost a year. How do you like USA, and how are things going in Huntsville?

DOERING: I love working for USA. People have been very welcoming, and I’ve learned a lot. I think the best part is that as I’m out talking to companies and potential customers in Huntsville, I find that people love USA. The reputation of our people and the work we’ve done for NASA precedes us. So where I expect to have to go and sell USA, people are already excited about what we do for Space Shuttle and Space Station. So that’s been a great aspect of working for the company.

Huntsville. I love it. It is fantastic. It’s a little microcosm in the middle of Alabama that’s very cosmopolitan but still has a small town feel. It’s got a great symphony and ballet. It turns out that the group that came with Wernher von Braun brought a lot of their culture with them over from Germany. It was very important to them, and a lot of the cultural aspects of the community were established by them. The town is still very proud of that early space group, and they’ve kept that up.

Alabama is fantastic, and I’m really happy to be here.

UPDATE: Why was the Huntsville Capability Center created?

DOERING: There were several reasons. One was that USA has been traditionally known as a Florida or Houston contractor. We’ve supported the Marshall Space Flight Center on the Space Shuttle Program for a long time, and we have done a great job. But, a lot of people have the mistaken idea that “Oh, you’re focused on Houston” or “You’re focused on Florida; Marshall is an afterthought.” That’s obviously not the case, but we needed to demonstrate to our NASA customer and other companies here that USA really does care about the work we do in Huntsville, and we care about our customer at Marshall.

We also wanted to send a message to the USA employees in Huntsville that they were important, that there was a future with the company. There were a lot of rumors in the Huntsville area that USA was going to go out of business when the Shuttle finished flying. Clearly, that’s not the case, and a way to demonstrate that was to bring a vice president into Huntsville to show them that they are really important to us and that there is a future.

The third reason is that we see a lot of opportunities over the next few years in the Huntsville area, both as we continue to support NASA’s mission as well as a big opportunity in the Department of Defense area.

UPDATE: What is our goal for the Huntsville Capability Center?

DOERING: The primary goal is to grow. Of course, we want to continue to provide quality service and support to the existing NASA customer here, but we really want to see USA take advantage of the opportunities in Huntsville. Ideally, we would get new business in the Huntsville area and have a core group of people on the ground in Huntsville to be the customer interface that could reach back to the skills we have in Florida and Houston. That’s our model, but we’re learning from the Department of Defense (DoD) that their model is a little bit different.

They expect people to be physically located in Alabama, in Huntsville, and we’re hoping as time progresses we can help them understand that the type of matrixing and virtual work we do for NASA is a really good model. We want to demonstrate that everyone doesn’t have to be physically located together to operate as a team.

UPDATE: The decision of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission to move some work to the Redstone Arsenal there in Huntsville will have a tremendous impact on the community. Will we see any impacts from that?

DOERING: The BRAC activity took place in 2005, and the U.S. government decided to close and consolidate some Army and missile defense bases around the country. Fortunately for Huntsville, the Redstone Arsenal was the recipient for a lot of the work moving from other places. There is an expectation that 10,000 jobs are going to be moving from other Army bases and missile defense installations into Huntsville in the next two years. Based on past experience, the DoD estimates that only about 15 percent of the people will move with their jobs to Huntsville. So if you do the math, they are looking at about an 8,500 person shortfall in highly technical areas of engineers and technicians.

For USA, it seems to be a pretty straightforward opportunity. The DoD, the Missile Defense Agency and the Army will need about 8,500 engineers and technicians to come to Huntsville in the next couple of years, and with Space Shuttle ramping down, USA is going to have a number of people available for reassignment. It seems as though we can provide the expertise they need in a number of areas.

Now there are more than 400 aerospace companies in Huntsville competing for those 8,500 jobs, so it’s not as simple as showing up and saying, “Here we are.” What USA brings to the table is our reputation with NASA. Everyone knows what the Space Shuttle is and how complicated it is to operate and integrate. We also have a skilled workforce that’s going to be available that other companies don’t have.

UPDATE: How will you be posting those opportunities?

DOERING: There are several things we need to do. First, I want to stress that today these are new business prospects. These are not contracts we have in hand. Fortunately, a lot of the prime teams in Huntsville are very anxious to get us on their team as a subcontractor, so today what we’re busy doing is figuring out who the most promising prime contractors are to win some of the new work, we are developing teaming relationships with them and bidding on some of the contracts with them.

We don’t have the work today, but as soon as we do, we’ll post all of those jobs. But in order for me to really focus our efforts, I really need to know who wants to come to Huntsville. We recently put out a simple survey to ask what level of interest there is in potentially relocating to Huntsville after Shuttle. The response was outstanding.

I’ve talked a lot about the DoD opportunities. The reason that I haven’t focused on NASA is that I think most people are familiar with the Constellation opportunities that are going to be coming. USA is actively involved in Ares I and the Marshall Projects. We are also on teams for the Ares V competition.

As I said before, we currently support the Marshall Space Flight Center. We have a new blanket purchase agreement with Marshall which gives us the ability to support them in areas where they need USA expertise but that don’t fall within the existing Constellation contracts. Those opportunities are going to be very important, but they are going to be of a more limited nature in regard to the number of people working on those contracts.

UPDATE: What are our challenges for winning new work in that market?

DOERING: First, there is a lot of competition. As I mentioned before, there are 400 aerospace companies in the Huntsville area. Some of them are well known, and others are a couple of people who decided to form a company and get some of the business.

The biggest challenge on the DoD side is educating them on what we do for NASA. Because we’ve been focused on one customer for such a long time, we’re not a well known commodity on the defense side of the house. Once they hear what we do, they are very excited.

UPDATE: Any closing thoughts?

DOERING:  Forbes Magazine recently named Madison County – which is the county where Huntsville is – as the best place in the U.S. to weather the economic crisis. It was also named as one of the top five middle-sized towns in the country to raise children. It’s got the second largest technology park in the country, the third largest in the world. Most of the people in the area are professionals working for NASA, the Department of Defense or the biotech industry, so it’s really a wonderful place to live and work.

I wish everyone could have the opportunity to spend some time here because I don’t think they’d want to leave.

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