Date of Conferral

2016

Degree

Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.)

School

Management

Advisor

Patricia Fusch

Abstract

The federal government has been inconsistent in meeting the mandated contracting set-aside goals of 3% to aid service-disabled veteran small business owners. Guided by the general systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore what strategies an owner and 2 senior managers of a small service-disabled veteran-owned business in the Washington, DC metropolitan used to obtain federal contracts. The owner and senior members represented those responsible for strategic vision, development of business opportunities, and the company acquisition process. Data were collected from semistructured face-to-face interviews and corporate documents. Member checking and transcript review were completed to strengthen trustworthiness of interpretations of the participants' responses. Based on the methodological triangulation of the data sources collected, 6 themes emerged from the data analysis as key strategies to obtain federal contracts: business practices, business development of opportunities to attain growth, marketing to obtain opportunities to bid, networking to gain industry knowledge on trends and markets, understanding federal government contracts which emphasized the federal acquisition system access and availability of procurement information, and contract bidding which emphasized the importance of solution development. The findings from the study may contribute to social change by providing insights and strategies for service-disabled veteran small business owners in sustaining profitability through obtaining government contracts. The data from this study may contribute to the prosperity of the veteran small business owners, their employees, their families, and local communities.

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