August Spotlight: Jeffrey Kuehn of Colossal Contracting, LLC

What is your current position at Colossal Contracting, LLC?

I am the Vice President of Engineering for Colossal Contracting.

What inspired you to build a career in engineering services / Federal IT?

From an early age, I’ve always been a fan of technology.  I still have memories of watching my parents work from home on their old Commodore 128 and participating in summer camps at the local community college where we worked with Apple II computers to help program Lego cars to make their way through an obstacle course.  Even as my parents migrated to DoS and then Windows based computer systems, I could always be found working on those systems, playing games or simply exploring how they worked.  By the time I was twelve, I had built my first computer from scratch.  I had gone to college briefly for Computer Science, but was distracted by another passion of mine, music.  It was ultimately my time as a touring musician and audio engineer at a local recording studio that helped me to recognize that my love for technology could be made into a career.  It was around that time that I went back to college for an associate in Information System Security and where I got my CCNA and Security+ certifications that helped me land a job with a Federal Contractor and Cisco Gold partner, based in the DC Metro area.

How did you work your way up to a leadership position? 

I like to think that my rise to a leadership position was a combination of hard work and timing. I’m a voracious consumer of information; I try to read a new book each week. In addition, I work hard to stay on top of the latest trends in technology through blogs, podcasts, and training videos. My love of learning has helped me get expert certifications such as my CCIE Wireless and CWNE.  This eventually led to my positions on advanced technical delivery teams like Cisco Advanced Services where I was able to hone my craft. However, timing had a lot to do with it as well.

While working with Cisco Advanced Services as a contractor, I owned my own company and was at a point in my life where I had to decide between continuing with my own company and trying to strike it out on my own, or staying with a nice job at Cisco.  It was during this time that the opportunity presented itself with an old friend and former colleague, who was now a partner at Colossal.  Colossal had the contracts and an amazing sales team in place and they were offering me the opportunity to continue to feed my entrepreneurial spirit. They allowed me to grow a practice within their organization, while being able to focus on what drives me, technology and working with talented engineers.

What does a typical workday look like (if any of us even have “typical” workdays anymore!)? Do you have a daily routine or ritual that you swear by / that helps you stay focused, especially during this time of global crisis? 

I would have to say that one of the areas that has helped me personally is to gamify virtually everything I do, from tasks, to workouts, to dieting.  For tasks, there is a great app available for your phone and Chrome extension called Forest.  I use this app to stay focused on tasks for a preset timeframe.  I usually only get an hour or two before my family wakes up or an hour or two after they go to bed.  This is when I get the largest chunk of time to focus on whatever I need to.  Otherwise, it’s usually twenty minutes here or ten minutes there.  Forest helps me to focus on tasks during those finite periods and build a forest of my own, which forces me to compete against myself.

I have also recently set aside specific times within the day to respond to email.  I was finding it hard to stay focused when trying to constantly respond to emails throughout the day, so I have set up three points during the day where all I do is respond to emails that have piled up.  I let the team know to contact me by either phone or text for emergencies.  This has really helped me to stay focused and increase my efficiency. Lastly, I try to do guided meditation each night before going to bed.  I find this helps me to stay grounded and allows me to reflect on everything I did that day.  It also helps relieve some of my stress, which my family appreciates, as I’m less irritable.

Tell us more about your work at Colossal. How do you manage your team? What is the most rewarding aspect of your job? Why did you choose to build your career at Colossal? 

At Colossal, I’m responsible for the day-to-day operations of the entire engineering team.  This includes all pre-sales and post-sales engineering support, internal IT support, and all managed services activities we provide for our customers. While there is no “typical” day, I often find myself jumping between every aspect of what Colossal does.  I might have a customer requirement gathering call in the morning to gather information needed to provide them with a quote for market research, then I might have some time to touch up the technical aspect of our marketing one-sheeters.  Afterward, I might spend an hour supporting one of our delivery engineers with reviewing a customer deliverable for one of our projects, followed up by time fixing a bug in our internal Level-of-Effort tool.  After several more pre-sales calls and RFP response writing, a project call with a customer, and some deliverable writing for a project that I am the lead architect on, I might cap off the day by watching some training videos for a certification Colossal needs me to take to help boost our status with a specific vendor.  All that might just be my Wednesday.

When it comes to the Engineers on my team, I try to lead them by example.  I will never ask them to do something that I personally wouldn’t do myself.  Whether it’s traveling to a remote location for a project or an on-site assessment, to staying late during the Federal fiscal year-end to support our sales team, to taking a certification to boost our status with a vendor.  I’m a big fan of the books from former Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.  One thing they talk about in their book Extreme Ownership, is leading from the top down.  Making sure your team knows why you are asking them to do something.  Sharing the bigger picture with them, so we all have the same vision and end goals in mind, and we know how each task that is being requested of us fits into that bigger picture.

The most rewarding part of my job is seeing the growth of our talented engineers.  I love seeing someone completely green in the industry or new to a particular technology grow and become a strong lead engineer, able to hold their own in either presales and requirements gathering, delivery and configuration, or both.  The other exciting part of my job is coming up with new solutions to fix a problem for our customers.  Understanding new technologies and how they can be incorporated into our customer’s missions is just fun.  I often joke with my team and our customers that when we create a new solution for them, and it works as planned and helps drive their business or mission forward, it’s what I like to call the Tom Hanks moment.  It feels just like Tom Hanks did in the movie Castaway, where he bangs his fists on his chest and screams, “I have mad FIRE!” after making fire without matches for the first time.  Just like in the movie, solution building is often an iterative process, takes a long time, but the creation at the end is exciting and very rewarding.

I chose to build my career at Colossal for several reasons.  It was very easy to see that they were on a high-speed growth trajectory.  They had exponential sales growth when I first started talking to them, they had positioned themselves exceptionally well by capturing a large amount of some of the most sought-after government wide acquisition contracts.  In addition, ownership was ready and willing to invest everything back into the company to help it grow.  Lastly, the culture is what sealed the deal.  I was already friends with Eric Dent, one of the owners, and knew how great a salesman and person he was, but Anthony Closson, the founder and CEO, is a spirit like no other.  He has built a company with a culture that is fast paced and exciting.  Everyone’s opinions are valued, and it is extremely fun to work at Colossal.  This, I think is furthered by the success that I have personally seen since joining the company.  Our exponential sales growth has continued.  That same growth has been seen in our services sales.  We have expanded the engineering team from three to almost twenty in a little over two years.  We have also defied all the pundits in the industry by becoming the first of now two SDVOSBs in the world to become a Cisco Gold partner.  There are even more big things to come.  All of this was made possible by the incredible team that Anthony and Eric have put in place at Colossal and the great Culture that they have built and that I strive to share with my team.

What is the most significant way that COVID-19 has affected your work? 

I feel like since the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all busier than ever.  Perhaps that is because many of our customers are turning to us to help them navigate the waters and find new ways to stay in touch and drive their missions forward remotely.  The other reason might be due to the fact that I’m now having to do my normal work, assist with home school, and take care of the household cleaning, all without going insane from stress, isolation, and lack of vitamin D.  I think that turning on our cameras when on a WebEx or Zoom call has been helpful to keep the human connection alive and well, even if our attire has become more relaxed over time.

Like most people, I hope that we can find a safe way to get things back to normal, however, I feel like that may be a long way off.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying the extra time I get to spend with my family, and I am simply adjusting my routines to fit this new world we live in.  Colossal is helping by working with our partners to extend Internet access to underprivileged neighborhoods with wireless mesh networks within inner cities like Buffalo, in an effort to make sure kids are able to continue their educations remotely.  We are also helping many of our government customers get signed up and trained on Cisco’s FedRAMP WebEx offering.  I know that we will all get through this.

What 3 pieces of advice would you give to young professionals looking to start their careers in engineering / IT? 

• Become a master in at least one technology.  It can be difficult to set yourself apart from the pack.  Becoming a master in a technology, especially one that is highly sought after, can help make you indispensable to your organization and help you progress through your career much faster.
• Learn as much as you can about everything.  The lines along technology verticals are becoming more and more blurred.  In order to be a master in one technology, you have to have experience and expertise in multiple technologies.  You cannot just be a network engineer any more.  You also have to be a security engineer and a programmer.  Security is required in all that we do, but now many network management and automation tools are requiring you to become proficient in Python and DevOps practices.  Learning as much as possible will make you an overall better engineer and a master in whatever field you choose to become a master in.
• Breathe and have fun.  This industry is so faced paced, that it can sometimes be hard to remember to take some time for yourself and relax.  Always remember to breathe and try to make the best of everything you have to do.  Even the most daunting and tedious tasks can be made fun.  Listen to music or a podcast while you survey WIFI or try to gamify your documentation creation.  If you don’t relax and have fun, you will get burnt out very quickly.

Do you have a favorite quote or mantra that inspires you?

I would not be a proper geek without providing a quote from Star Wars.  This one comes from Master Yoda himself.  “You must unlearn what you have learned.”  I have always loved this quote because it shows that we must be willing to adapt and change.  It’s OK for our views on life or our approach to a problem to change as new information or methods become available.  It is essential to our survival to adapt and in most cases that requires us to throw out our old ways of thinking and to adopt new ones.