Proving It

IEven when he wound up in the hospital after a moped accident, sixteen-year-old Scott Goss wasn’t ready to admit he was in a downward spiral. It was only a couple of months later, when he re-entered the hospital for drug use, that the truth of his reality began to set in. As his peers prepared to attend Ivy League schools, he was living in a friend’s car and working at a gas station. He never thought about the future because, at that point, he didn’t have one.

I can’t say what spurred that moment of waking up, but I know that it didn’t come from my parents, or the doctors, or any of the external voices trying to get through to me. It was a decision I, and only I, could make for myself.”

“For the first time since I had started to fall off the tracks at age fourteen, I began to realize how bad things had gotten,” he remembers now. “I had been permanently suspended from school and ran away from home. My junior year was half gone, and my senior year was approaching when I was suspended from high school permanently. What was my life going to be? Where was I going to live, and what was I going to do for a living? I can’t say what spurred that moment of waking up, but I know that it didn’t come from my parents, or the doctors, or any of the external voices trying to get through to me. It was a decision I, and only I, could make for myself.”

“But I got past that and saw that I could be somebody and succeed. I’m driven by the feeling of being able to say, ‘I can do this’—by the feeling of being challenged, and learning, and proving that I can turn adversity into success.”

Just as the decision to change was all Scott, what came next was all him as well. One year later, he was making exceptional grades at boarding school and had assumed a leadership role amongst his peers as a dorm prefect. Six years later, he graduated from a prestigious university in the top five percent of his class. And today, he’s the President and CEO of Preferred System Solutions (PSS) Inc., a high-end government IT contractor specializing in computer systems, cloud computing, data analysis and analytics, and cyber security. “I remember being in high school, seeing the success of others and feeling that I couldn’t measure up,” he says today. “But I got past that and saw that I could be somebody and succeed. I’m driven by the feeling of being able to say, ‘I can do this’—by the feeling of being challenged, and learning, and proving that I can turn adversity into success.”

PSS was first launched as a staff augmentation company in 1991 by Rob Hisel. Focused mostly on commercial staffing, the company grew modestly until 1997, when it received its 8(a) certification and made its initial foray into government contracting. Rob sold the commercial staffing portion of his business to a dotcom company just in time to lose everything when the dotcom bubble burst. Despite the devastating blow, he picked himself up without missing a beat and decided to focus on growing his government contracting work.

Scott was first introduced to Rob in 1996 while working for SIGNAL Corporation. SIGNAL was acquired by Veridian, which was later acquired by General Dynamics, and after a great ride, he had begun consulting on his own. He took Rob on as a client in 2004, helping him grow PSS from $18 million to $38 million by 2006. Rob then began considering an exit strategy, ultimately convincing Scott, along with CM Equity, to step in as President and CEO in August of 2007.

At that time, 40 percent of the company’s business was from 8(a) government contracts, 35 percent was from small businesses contracts, and 25 percent was from commercial staffing. The company had grown to 280 employees specializing in IT contracting. The regulatory environment was shifting along with the economic downturn, but Scott succeeded in leading the company through seven acquisitions beginning in 2009. “We’ve refaced the company into something brand new today,” he affirms. “It’s been great for the company, great for the staff, and great for the clients.” Thanks to this approach and to the strong performance of PSS, Scott won a GovCon M&A award in 2015—a recognition for which he has been a finalist four years running.

Now a team of over 400 people doing approximately $100 million in revenue, PSS has advanced its focus to big data, analytics, cyber security, mobile applications, software, and high level program management systems. Seventy percent of the company’s business comes from the intelligence community, while the other 30 percent comes from other federal agencies like the Navy, Army, Department of Transportation, and Department of Homeland Security. And like the man at its helm, the company is constantly evolving. “It’s important to me to have a purpose, make an impact, and learn something new every day,” he says. “I believe that when you stop learning in business, or in life, you lose your drive.

This drive for constant advancement is more a reflection of his mother’s influence than his father’s. His father was a relaxed and kind-hearted man who grew up in a blue collar family in DC and forged his own father’s signature so he could enter the Navy at age sixteen. His mother, on the other hand, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped Austria at the age of seven, only after her own father was already taken to a camp. The trauma heightened her guard as a parent, and she was exceptionally protective and strict when it came to Scott and his older sister, Penny. “Growing up, I felt constant pressure to prove myself, moving on to the next thing as soon as I solved a problem,” Scott recalls. “Giving up or quitting were simply not options. My mother never let me quit anything I started, and she never let me wallow. She taught me to go right out the next day and get back on the horse. I was constantly driven by the need to figure out whatever challenge lay before me so I could begin working on the next one.”

Born in Philadelphia, Scott was one when the family moved to Rye Town, New York, near the Connecticut border. His father was a chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, while his mother was a teacher, and they shared a wonderfully close marriage. Scott was a happy-go-lucky, well-behaved, well-mannered kid who enjoyed playing baseball and stickball with other kids in the neighborhood. His parents were incredibly hardworking, with his father often juggling two or three jobs, and were able to spend time with the children only rarely. “They didn’t come to our ball games, and I can count on one hand the number of times we went out to dinner as a family,” Scott recalls. “I decided I didn’t want to live like that when I grew up. I wanted to achieve the kind of success that brings peace of mind, knowing early on that my kids would be provided for.”

The Gosses were a middle-class family living in a wealthy neighborhood, and while other kids enjoyed silver spoons, Scott learned to work for what he wanted. When he turned thirteen, he had the choice between a Bar Mitzvah party like his friends were having, or a trip to Israel. He chose the latter, which became the first and only vacation his family took together while he was growing up. “They told me I wouldn’t remember a 4-hour party in 30 years, but I’d definitely remember the trip,” Scott says. “I convinced them to add Italy and Egypt into the mix, and they were right—I still remember that trip. I gave my own children the same opportunity, and like me, they chose the Pyramids and the Dead Sea.”

Scott’s mother believed in mitzvahs, or good deeds, and taught the importance of giving of yourself, doing the right thing, and keeping busy. He cut his neighbors’ lawns for free, volunteered in a nearby hospital, and had a paper route. He wasn’t allowed to play capture the flag with friends in the evenings because his parents thought it was a sign of bad character to be out on the streets at night. They forced him to play the piano, waking up at 5:30 AM to practice for an hour before school and then again after school, but Scott wanted to play the drums. At eight years old, he began saving up to buy his own drum set, and by age 12, he was in a band.

As Scott entered high school, his parents’ strict ways began to take a toll. He dreamed of growing up to be a rock star and began gravitating toward a different crowd. He began to rebel, getting into drugs and letting his grades plummet as he headed down a path of self-destruction that led to his permanent suspension from school in eleventh grade. The gravity of the situation didn’t even register with him; instead, he started working full-time at a gas station and joined a different band, practicing long hours in their studio late nights in White Plains. “I was being led by some very strong social influences, instead of a good sense of right and wrong,” he reflects. “I think I was predisposed to certain behaviors, and the reigns were just pulled too tight, so I bucked.”

“I ended up in the hospital after going through the roughest period of my life, and I decided to go to a counselor with my parents. I especially remember my mother saying she still loved me because I was her son. That really had an impact on me.”

It was seven months later that Scott hit rock bottom. “I had run away from home and continued with the drugs, living in a friend’s car or wherever I could,” he remembers. “I ended up in the hospital after going through the roughest period of my life, and I decided to go to a counselor with my parents. I especially remember my mother saying she still loved me because I was her son. That really had an impact on me.”

The counselor said Scott needed to get away from his life in New York, where his friends were bad influences and the environment was too fraught. The counselor strongly suggested boarding school, and at first, Scott adamantly refused to consider it. But he had truly scared himself. “I finally woke up and realized that if I continued on that way, I’d be dead within two years,” he says. “I needed to redo my life, and I saw that change couldn’t come from anybody else—it had to come from me.”

In the end, Scott agreed to go away to boarding school at West Nottingham Academy in Colora, Maryland, close enough to where his sister Penny was attending college at the University of Maryland. Slowly but surely, he began to get his life together, studying and working hard. His grades rose surprisingly quickly, and within a month of being there, he was appointed to serve as a dorm prefect—a position of responsibility that many students never attained. His strong academic performance continued through his two years at the Academy, landing him admission to American University (AU). “I knew AU was the school I’d be able to work hardest at, and where I’d really excel,” Scott says. “My parents were big, big believers in education, and sacrificed a lot to help me get there. So that meant a lot to them.”

At AU, Scott majored in philosophy and minored in business and music. He continued playing gigs around town, though at that point he knew it wouldn’t be his career. He worked his way through college doing construction, mostly focused on drywall. With a set of tools that included the first spackel knife his father ever owned, he went to work every single day to support himself as he made the most of the opportunity many thought he would never get. “Drywall is not a very pretty trade, and because I was working nonstop, I’d come home looking like a mess every day,” he says. “But I still have those same tools today, 34 years later.”

Scott will never forget the day he returned from spring break at Daytona Beach during his freshman year, when he went to see his brother-in-law, Dean Packard. He remembers fixing his car horn in the driveway when a young woman from next door came outside the house. She was babysitting and had come out to yell at him for making such a racket, but the two struck up a conversation instead. They began dating, and today, Nicole and Scott have been married for 27 years come May 2017.

Several years later, when Scott was a junior, his mother convinced him that an accounting class would be helpful no matter what he decided to do in life. He signed up and worked hard as usual, and halfway through the semester, his professor had a conversation with him. “He wasn’t surprised to hear I was a philosophy major because I thought very logically,” Scott says. “Then he told me that accounting is logic. I asked him if I looked like an accountant, and then he—this cool professor who drove a Porsche—asked if he looked like one. He told me he used accounting every day of his life even though he wasn’t an accountant. He told me it could be whatever I made it into, and that I had a knack for it. He ended up convincing me to stick with it.”

When Scott graduated from AU in the top five percent of his class, he applied for an academic fellowship for a masters accounting program. “I didn’t get it, and I wasn’t surprised,” he says. “I gave up on that possibility and instead decided to partner with a friend to start my own construction company.” Several months later, however, he got a call from the toughest professor in the whole school—a woman who taught him during his senior year. The original fellowship recipient had just dropped out, and Scott had two hours to decide if he wanted the fellowship. “It was a life defining moment,” he recalls. “I decided to go for it, shelving the company I had already gotten off the ground to go back to school as a graduate fellow working at the Kogod School of Business. In the span of two hours, I suddenly found myself on a very different path.”

While working toward his masters, Scott did a significant amount of IT work on the side, and came to know the inner workings of computers like the back of his hand. At the time, tech companies were transforming old mainframe systems into client servers, and Scott found himself at the cutting edge of that market. He dabbled in databases, software, and systems, and handled network management for the accounting department at the university.

After completing his masters in 1991, he landed a position at Development Resources in Bethesda, Maryland, and commenced a period of intense learning. He spent the following six years working harder than anyone else and accumulating knowledge as his career coursed from Development Resources, to Network Management, to PRC. He then accepted a position as controller at McFadden and Associates, and then took a Director job at iNet. “My first daughter was born in 1996, and my second in 2000. Since I was working double time, it was a lot to juggle,” he recalls. “Those were my years to be a sponge, learning and working as hard as I could and listening to the successful entrepreneurs I was working for.”

When iNet was acquired by Wang Federal, Scott faced another defining moment in choosing between a CIO job there, or a Controller job at SIGNAL Corporation. The fork in the road was ultimately a choice between a career in IT or a career in accounting, and against the recommendations of many, he took the latter position. “I had really clicked with SIGNAL’s CEO, Roger Mody,” Scott says. “He gave me the opportunity to light a fire in his company, and I went all out. And I felt a lot of loyalty to him for giving me that opportunity. I was going to do all I could to make him successful.” Over the next six years, Scott helped the company grow from $33 million to $320 million, taking on the CFO and CIO roles. Then, after several unsuccessful attempts at selling the company, Scott negotiated and ran the successful transaction that sold SIGNAL to Veridian.

“SIGNAL took a shot on me, and it was so rewarding to help it grow exponentially and then personally doing the sale in 2002,” he reflects. “I became a President of Veridian, which had recently gone public, and I was running all of IT beneath me. It was a big defining moment in my career.” Also through that time period, Scott launched a consulting practice on the side, which gave him the opportunity to work with around 160 different companies across a wide range of sectors. After Veridian was acquired by General Dynamics in 2003, Scott left to focus on the entrepreneurial thrill of consulting full-time, which ultimately led to the opportunity at PSS.

His wife, Nicole, has been by his side the whole way through the evolution from blue collar worker to CEO. “I’m a tough person with a high bar, but it doesn’t faze her at all,” he says. “She accepts me for who I am and has always been supportive and understanding, even in those times that I’ve needed to work long hours. She’s my partner, my soulmate, my rock, and my sounding board. I think the world of her.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Scott underscores the importance of getting a good education and mastering the work ethic, learning, and analysis skills that spell success along any career path. Recognizing that success means different things to different people, he stressed the importance of thinking ahead, being smart, and taking chances in life. And above all else, he emphasizes the importance of hard work. “It doesn’t really matter what school you go to,” he says. “What matters is the work you do and what you make of it. I’ve watched people graduate from Ivy League schools who were very book smart, but without street smarts and common sense, they failed miserably at business. It’s one thing to understand business theoretically on paper, but practical application is quite another. The world is what you make of it, and if you decide something is worth doing, give it 110 percent.”

“I was the kid who wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “But I proved to myself and others what I was made of, and now here I am. You never know what life has in store, but in the end, it’s you who gets to decide how far you go.”

Despite leading PSS, commuting to work from Florida, and being a present husband to Nicole and father to their two daughters, Kayla and Michelle, Scott still makes time in his life for consulting—his way of giving a hand up to others. To Scott, consulting is an opportunity to see things in people that others may not see. When he recognizes a drive in someone, however hidden, he makes it a priority to use his own experience to help them achieve a level of success they might not reach otherwise. “I was the kid who wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “But I proved to myself and others what I was made of, and now here I am. You never know what life has in store, but in the end, it’s you who gets to decide how far you go.”

‍