Earlier this month, Dan Barkin of NC Military Report drove down U.S. 1 to Richmond County, to a 300-acre training and testing compound operated by Oak Grove Technologies, a military and law enforcement contractor headquartered in Raleigh. The compound is located near Camp Mackall, a sub-installation of Fort Liberty and a Special Forces assessment and selection site.
The occasion was the third annual Technology Innovation Demonstration Day (TechID 2024). The event is put on by Accel Innovation Corp and Oak Grove to help small companies show their products to warfighters. There were around 20 companies there, spread over different locations on the compound, with capabilities in communications, artificial intelligence, cyber-security, logistics and things that explode in battle simulations.
Oak Grove Technologies
The Richmond County compound is just one part of Oak Grove Technologies. Much of its business is supporting and running government facilities and training programs around the country. According to USAspending.com, Oak Grove has won around $240 million in obligated federal contract funds over the past two decades.
It was founded by Mark Gross, (right) a Pennsylvania native, who joined the Army out of high school. After the military, he graduated from college, and worked in the Justice Department. In the mid-’90s, he came to Raleigh and became a software salesman.
“I had an idea for a government contracting firm,” said Gross. “It sort of morphed to this over time.” He founded Oak Grove in 2003, with no outside funding. “I was solo. I did everything.”
Today, Oak Grove has more than 400 employees in 37 states. “We run the federal law enforcement training center in Artesia, New Mexico,” he said. “We run the Hazardous Devices School for the FBI down in Huntsville, Alabama. We have experts at the national lab in Tennessee, chem-bio, nuclear.”
Fourteen years ago, he bought the acreage off U.S. 1. He had a contract with a counter-terrorism organization, and “they needed a shoot house. So that’s the first thing I built, was the shoot house. I reached out to industry, and I reached out to the FBI SWAT, and I said, ‘Hey, listen, I don’t know what I’m building but if you guys help me, you can use it for free for training. And, so, they all showed up.”
“And the FBI still comes,” said Gross, “the divisional SWAT team out of Charlotte.”
Several weeks ago, Gross stepped away from the CEO role to become chairman. Richard Haggerty moved up to CEO from chief operating officer. Haggerty, a former Army helicopter pilot, had extensive experience managing Special Operations acquisition programs during his 32-year military career.
Accel Innovation
The other partner in the Technology Day, Accel Innovation of Pinehurst, is trying to help companies to someday become as successful as Oak Grove. Retired Army Col. Dean Hoffman IV, (right) the co-founder and president of Accel, is a former Special Forces officer who rose to become the chief financial officer of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Liberty.
The mission of Accel is to help innovative companies navigate the government acquisition process, and help the military find the technology it needs.
“One of the biggest challenges that I found when I was in the government was that unless you knew somebody, you really didn’t know innovative technology,” said Hoffman. “And there’s a ton of it out there. So how do you bring it to the government?”
The problem today is that technological innovation is moving faster than ever, and our adversaries are working to get their own innovators’ breakthroughs into the hands of their warfighters. If our military is going to keep pace, it needs the latest stuff.
Accel will go to the military and ask, “What are you looking for?”
“We go to the Fort Liberty units, mostly, because they’re the most deployed units out there,” said Hoffman, “whether JSOC, USASOC or XVIII Airborne.”
“We get a list of problems from them, and then I push them out through the venture capital, private equity, high net worth [networks] and ask for companies that may solve these problems. And we get probably around 50 companies that apply and we down-select” to the group invited.
“The key is,” said Hoffman, “is they have to demonstrate. It can’t be an idea. Literally, the whole intent is for users to put hands on keyboards, fly a drone, play with the technology, use it like they would in the field in an operational environment.”
“Getting on [Fort Liberty] is a challenge, especially for vendors, so we do it out here so it’s very easy and it’s close enough for the government.” Companies have a lot of questions about the acquisition process, said Hoffman. “Who do I talk to? What’s a SBIR? How do I even submit a proposal? All that kind of stuff.”
“Everybody talks about how hard it is. The government’s great once you’re in. But it just takes a while to get in.”
He said the big trade shows are not an option for many startups. A booth is too expensive. Vendors at the Oak Grove event were charged $1,000, which is donated to a Joint Special Operations Association scholarship fund.
The timing of the event in early May was a recognition of a couple of things. Around this time in the budget year, when he was the JSOC CFO, “I’d start looking at people’s spend plan and see are they on spend plan or if they weren’t. And if they weren’t, where else could we use that money?” So, there’s money available.
Excerpt From NC Military Report, by Dan Barkin. Read the full article here. "Military Report" is a once-a-week newsletter covering an industry that provides 11 percent of the jobs in North Carolina. This newsletter is your go-to for understanding the defense industry in the state.
Comments