Taija Thomas is the Founder and CEO of Lion Solutions, an enterprise IT services and solutions company.
I’ve been in Montgomery County for 15 years. Born in D.C., I went to Prince George’s County schools for middle and high school.
I’ve been in IT as a subject matter expert since 1998. I didn’t start out wanting to be an entrepreneur. I just wanted to be the best professional that I could be. But growing through 15 years at the organization where I got my start, I realized I had a knack for leadership.
One day, I just said, “I think I can start a small business, and lead. I know a little about government contracting. I know enough about technology to lead technologist.” That’s how my entrepreneurship journey began back in 2016. I was a senior manager in IT for a healthcare company and was still a full-time employee.
In January 2016, I started Lion Solutions originally as a side project. We’re a certified minority-owned enterprise IT services and solutions company. We bring modernized technology to government sector organizations – federal, state, and local as well as a portfolio of nonprofit organizations.
I still needed to learn what it took to grow a successful business. Turns out, there’s not much to starting a business. With $120, you can register a business name and start a business. I would find out, though, that the game is really about driving, marketing, developing, and growing a business.
January 1, 2019, is when I truly committed to growing a company and left my full-time job. The day you’re no longer a full-time employee, that’s when the rubber meets the road, and you get to see: “Can I really survive this?”
Nonprofits were my first independent contracts. Back in 2019, I had a couple of small projects in healthcare – they support local health departments across the U.S. And I’m still working with them today.
But I had worked for a government contractor supporting USDA on three different contracts for about 15 years, from 1998-2013. I got to understand the government contracting cycles. I got to understand proposals, as I was often called in as a senior engineer to help with some of the technical aspects. So I got exposed to bits and pieces of government contracting. In 2020, five years later, I supported that same customer as a subcontractor. That was my first government contract, and it was as a sub to the prime contractor with the same agency with whom I’d started my career.
So, I’ve been growing Lion Solutions for the last four years. We’re still young. We’re still learning the game, taking our bumps.
Developing, Learning, and Growing
One noteworthy point is that I’m a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, Baltimore cohort. I finished that in 2020. That program changed everything. Without that program, at that time, I don’t know if I would still be in business. This program involved a cohort of 40 companies. It was full-time from September-December 2020, getting underway just as COVID started.
Experiencing that period together, we could see what everybody in our cohort went through. I got to see a lot of resilience and understand the fundamental skillset you have to have as a small business. The program was the root, the ground-laying of understanding what it was really going to take to grow this business. Understanding finance. Understanding money and metrics. Understanding leadership. Understanding marketing and selling. Understanding growth strategies. Understanding yourself as a business.
Understanding that people needed to pivot to survive. “What does a “pivot” look like for me?” Without that intense training, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
We’ve been able to do amazing things. We’ve got incredible partnerships and collaborations. We’re young and growing, but we do a lot of community outreach. We support several organizations in Montgomery County: Montgomery College Workforce Development and Continuing Education. Montgomery Can Code Summer Program, Montgomery College ignITe Hub, a program for families interested in technology. I learned the importance of this kind of engagement in the Goldman program. The program exists to develop companies so they can grow, do well, and contribute back to communities. And provide opportunities as we grow.
As a business owner, you have to develop yourself somewhere. This program opened up some realities for me right when I got off the fence and got really committed.
What’s Ahead for Lion Solutions
We want to continue to grow our government contracting. We are an 8(A) certified small business. We were just awarded a contract on GSA’s IT schedule – the GSA MAS schedule ( General Services Administration multi-award schedule). That is the largest procurement contract vehicle the federal government uses. At the end of 2022, we were also awarded on the State of Maryland CATS+ multi-award contract – the state’s largest IT procurement contract. And we are now waiting to hear from Montgomery County’s IT support and services contract MCATS3. We know how the government buys – and recognize that’s how they find and see you, and that’s the platform where they buy. So we’re positioning ourselves there.
These “contract vehicles” are particular opportunities for vetted companies that are certified as having the capacity and the potential to be successful in supporting large government constituents. Our 2023 growth plan is to pick up our opportunities in this federal market now that we are available to government customers.
You don’t always realize it along the way, but looking back, you can see that we’ve covered a lot of ground in four years.
Advice for Rising Entrepreneurs
You’ll want to keep that full-time job with stable employment while finding and establishing your direction in business. Because you can have all the industry and leadership smarts, but most of us don’t know anything about business when we start out. And that takes time. Being a business leader is a whole lot different. So my advice is: don’t jump off that fence too fast.
However, when the right opportunity finally shows up, and you are prepared, go for it. Because you won’t be available for many opportunities while you’re in a full-time job, and you won’t have the time to self-develop. Eventually, you have to get off that fence to really see what you have. And, if worse comes to worst, you can always go back to work.
In addition, be open to relationships. Everything is going to be relationship-driven; you’ll have to be collaborative. It’s going to be about authentic relationship building. It will be critical to your learning and growth and your key to opportunities.
When I speak to young scholars and entrepreneurs, I frame it as 5 Ps to Success:
- Be Proactive – Stay ahead of the game
- Be Prepared – You can’t be successful if you’re not prepared
- Be Persistent – You have to keep pushing and knocking on doors
- Persevere – You will have to pull through all kinds of circumstances along the way
- Be Patient – You will get there if you’re doing the first four. But you will have to be patient.
At Lion Solutions, we’ve got a long road ahead of us. We’ve got a lot of growth potential.
The “5 Ps” to this day keep us grounded.
