BACKGROUND

ASCI Federal Services LLC (ASCI) provides supply chain and asset management services support to federal government agencies to meet their mission to run effective and efficient logistics operations. We support federal government customers within continental U.S., as well as outside locations, such as Alaska, where our headquarters are located. When the ASCI Family of Companies was formed in 1999, we initially supported oil & gas customers in Alaska. In January of 2021, ASCI went through a partial liquidation and restructured as a majority women owned company and started the process of getting certified as a WOSB by the SBA and learning how to pursue federal contracts.

CHALLENGE

The changes our company faced between 2019 and 2021 were dramatic due to the sale of assets of our largest customer and the impact of COVID on the Oil & Gas industry. The company faced an impending crisis due to our lack of diversification, from both a customer and industry perspective. Sales were difficult during this period due to both a lack of industry demand and the process of entering new markets. Our company shrank from 125 employees to the 6 at our lowest point in mid-2022. We had no experience with federal contracting and felt like we were starting a whole new business. We liked to refer to ourselves as a 22 year-old start-up. Between January 2021 and October 2022, ASCI lost more than 90% of our revenue and 95% of our employee base, which devastated our company.

ACTIONS

As an immediate diversification strategy, our CEO led the company through a partial liquidation to restructure the business ownership and became the majority owner of the company in January 2021. She navigated the company through two rounds of PPP funding and forgiveness to help keep our remaining employees paid and our company going during this financial crisis. She also went out of her way to seek any help she could get from SCORE, PTAC, WBC, SBA and every resource we could tap into to help us learn the core knowledge to break into the federal market. Our team relied heavily on Anchorage PTAC/APEX services to assist with learning how to determine who buys what we sell, bid matching services, capability statement reviews, training (both locally and through Govology), pricing, proposal review, WOSB application process, and any other help we could get.

RESULTS

Within 16 months, ASCI successfully landed the first federal government contract. In November of 2022, we were awarded a $12.4M contract with General Services Administration (GSA) for logistics services support in Alaska. ASCI will be responsible for providing a total supply chain solution: sourcing, procurement, warehousing, transporting and arranging transportation, and delivery of office supplies, tools and hardware, houseware, furniture, and cleaning products to DoD and Federal civilian customers in and around Alaska. In December 2022, we were officially certified by the SBA as a WOSB.

We attribute both of these successes directly to the support that we have received from Craig Von Holdt in the Anchorage PTAC/APEX office. He reviewed all aspects of our proposal and pricing for this contract and provided guidance and support during the more than 14 months that we spent pursuing this contract. He also provided guidance and support to assist us with navigating the WOSB application process due to our complicated organizational structure.