Grace Williams – Senior Associate, FLUET
Grace Williams has extensive experience in complex litigation, investigations, and employment law. She regularly counsels businesses on workplace matters. She represents both employees and employers in state/federal courts, as well as before the EEOC and MSPB. She is skilled in all litigation stages, settlement negotiations, internal/government investigations, and aggressively negotiating/litigating. Her employment practice involves advising government contractors and employers on complicated situations. This includes executive departures, internal disputes/investigations involving senior staff. She drafts, reviews, and negotiates non-compete, non-solicitation, non-disclosure, and severance agreements. She focuses on cost-effective conflict resolution strategies while protecting clients’ interests.
Deborah B. Dunie – Independent Board Director / Executive Consultant
Deborah “Deb” Dunie is an Independent Board Director, executive consultant, and former C-suite executive working with both publicly traded and private companies. She brings her extensive knowledge of technology, cyber security, privacy, data analytics, digital transformation, and enterprise governance to the boardroom, mergers and acquisitions, and executive leadership engagements. Deb is a NACD Certified Director, Board Leadership Fellow, recognized for her commitment to the highest standards of boardroom excellence. Since 2016, she is a member of the faculty of the NACD Board Advisory Services, where she mentors executives and is called upon to speak to boards about cyber security, risk management, strategic growth and C-suite relations.
Deb currently serves as an Independent Board Director for private equity portfolio companies: Veritas Capital (Babel Street, LLC) and; Sagewind Capital (Axient, LLC and Sigma Defense, LLC). She also serves as a Director for two companies operating under a Foreign Ownership Control, or Influence, Special Security Agreement with the U.S. Government (Leonardo U.S., and Hitachi Vantara Federal). Deb adds her support to venture-backed advanced technology companies in the cyber, data analytics, and communications markets.
Deb previously served on two boards of major publicly traded companies, SAIC (NYSE:SAIC) and Alliant Energy Corporation (NASDAC:LNT). At SAIC she served on the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, the Human Resources and Compensation Committee, and the Classified Business Oversight Committee. At Alliant Energy, she was a member of the Compensation and Personnel Committee, and the Operations Committee. Deb also formerly served as an Independent Board Director for Peraton Holdings, LLC, (more than $7B), and ArcField, LLC; both portfolio companies of Veritas Capital.
Deb brings over 30 years of C-suite and senior level business experience through key executive positions with leading technology companies. Deb semi-retired in 2015 as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of CACI International, a worldwide information solutions and services provider (NYSE: CACI). During her tenure at CACI she focused on driving the solutions-services portfolio and was instrumental in identifying and closing 18 mergers/acquisitions aligned to the corporate growth strategy. Widely quoted in industry publications, Deb was featured as the cover story for Washington Technology “Tech Gurus”, and in the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Magazine, “Special Section: Cybersecurity”. Throughout her career, Deb focused extensively on developing corporate culture, leadership, talent, and succession planning.
Prior to CACI, Deb was a member of the Department of Defense Senior Executive Service within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. As principal advisor to the USD(I), she was responsible for providing executive leadership, guidance, and reviews of DoD activities and programs as they related to U.S. national interests, defense policies, operational requirements, and state-of-the-art technologies. Her portfolio included the multi-billion-dollar Defense Intelligence IT budget.
In November 2006 Deb was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service. Specific mention in the citation states, “Ms. Dunie was a driving force in transforming the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community policies, guidance and standards. These efforts led to improvements in intelligence information sharing at the National level and Combatant Commander level in support of the Global War on Terrorism.”
Prior to her work with the federal government, Deb was responsible for e-business solutions within the national intelligence solutions group at Oracle Corporation, guided the strategic direction of Raytheon E-Systems’ Advanced Technology Program, and was responsible for new and follow-on business development in advanced technologies at Martin Marietta/GE Aerospace.
Deb is currently the Chair of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Capital Area Chapter Board; and is a member of and former Chair of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) International Technical Committee. She also is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Industry Advisory Board, the George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing Advisory Board, the Tufts University School of Engineering Advisory Board, and the Washington CTO Roundtable Board of Directors.
Deb earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University in Medford, MA, and a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. Deb holds a NACD Directorship Certification, completed the NACD Cyber-Risk Oversight Program, and received her Professional Certificate, CERT Certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight, from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute.
Kathy McNeill – Board of Director / Chief Technology Officer / AI/ML Strategist
Ms. McNeill is a highly accomplished Chief Technology Officer and Strategist renowned for their expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), with a distinguished career spanning over 25 years. A visionary leader, Ms. McNeill has orchestrated transformative digital initiatives across public and private sectors, driving enterprise optimization and customer-centric innovation. During her tenure in the federal government, she established the Artificial Intelligence practice within GSA that spanned all government agencies and included a Center of Excellence and a Community of Practice with more than 1200 agency participants. Currently, she is the Principal Enterprise Architect and Lead Strategist within CareFirst, a BlueCross Blue Shield Company and serves on multiple boards including the George Mason University Virginia Serious Game Institute.
Michel A. Vachon – Business Modeling, Business Planning, Strategic Planning, and Business Development
Mr. Michel Vachon has 40+ years of domestic and international experience as a senior executive managing business development, operations practices (process improvement: capture and proposal management), and strategic planning with major U.S. defense contractors and large infrastructure engineering companies.
After spending a 30-year career in executive positions with multi-national companies, he formed Strategy Advisors in 2011 with the goal of supporting systematic and sustainable growth thru organizational transformation.
He spent the last 12 years as the founder of Strategy Advisors, a privately held consulting practice offering business development strategies, dynamic business model generation and compelling value proposition creation for systematic and sustainable growth. His clients cover a wide range of industries:
- Manufacturing:
- National confectionary (Kimmy Candy)
- Elastomeric construction coatings: International Coatings Corporation (ICC)
- Sports management: Detroit Handball Club
- Global Trade Compliance Management: OCR, Inc.
- S. Government:
- Federal Aviation Agency (FAA)
- Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Telephone System
- Federal Contractors: from 8a-certified firms to large defense contractors, architects, and engineers (A&E)
- Triumph Enterprises
- McMullan International
- L3/Harris Technologies
- TRW (now Northrop Grumman)
- AMS (now CGI Federal)
- DynCorp
- International Resources Group (IRG)
- DMJM (subsidiary of AECOM)
- Utilities: Karachi Electric Company (Pakistan)
- Development projects: Al Noor Industries (Dubai, UAE)
- Foreign Governments:
- Criminal and Justice System Integration (Republic of South Africa)
- Health Management (State of Libya)
- Ministry of Small & Medium-size Enterprises (People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria)
- Tourism Industry: Interactive alternative marketing (Pretoria, Republic of Africa)
- Land Governance
- Púrpura Consulting (México)
- Buganda Land Governance (Uganda)
- Real Estate (Long & Foster)
- Private Sector Education: Re-imaging adult education (Bahamas)
He advocates that business models are key to success and accounting literacy is paramount to financial health. He also demonstrates that competition can be rendered irrelevant by combining high value and low cost without sacrificing profits.
His engaging workshops encourage ‘particip/action’ using real world examples and interactive communications to challenge his audience to achieve “triple A” results:
- Account/ability
- Action/ability
- Accept/ability
He has been a regular guest lecturer on business model generation and SEG applications[1] at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
He is an active private pilot with 6,000 hours of pilot-in-command (PIC) and FAA certified on single-engine, high-performance land aircraft. He enjoys classical music and is an Excel enthusiast!
Proficiencies and Education
Mr. Vachon has traveled to 132 countries speaks several languages, including English (native), French (native), Spanish (fluent), Italian (beginner) and Russian (read, write, conversational), and a non-written form of dialectal French (native).
Education and Training
BA: Pedagogy, Spanish and Mathematics, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada
BA: Slavic languages (Russian and Ukrainian), University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Shipley University: Winning Federal Proposals; Shipley Business Development Lifecycle
- University of Ottawa Teachers’ College: Permanent Teaching Certificate
- Centro Intercultural de Documentación, México: Social Sciences and Development, Spanish language (total immersion course)
- University of South Carolina (Columbia): Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer – Independent Studies
- Strategyzer® – Boston, MA: Strategyzer® Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Creation
- Project Management Institute (PMI) – PMP
Capabilities and Proficiencies
- National and International Sales Management/Business Development
- Business Model Generation
- Data-driven Strategic Planning
- Advanced Excel management tools
- Quantitative Risk Management
Technical Qualifications
- Business Development/Sales
- Business Model Generation – Strategyzer methodology
- Proposal Development – Shipley process
- Excel Business Applications – Jon Acampora process
- Expert level. Currently working on the Master level