Ruth Walters is betting Capital Region businesses can use a little more help winning state contracts. In fact, she has staked her future on it.
"This is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and it just seemed like the timing was right," said Walters, who quit her job as assistant state comptroller in December to start The Walters Group.
The Walters Group, based in downtown Albany, is a consulting firm for organizations that want to boost their chances of getting a slice of the $14 billion state procurement pie.
"There are really very few consultants who really understand the approval process," she said. "Nobody really focuses on this. People think the procurement market is just door-opening, but it's not. New York procurement laws are pretty byzantine, and you need someone to help you navigate that."
A big part of Walters' marketing approach is her unique qualifications for the job. While with the Comptroller's Office, also known as OSC, she was often "knee-deep" in the agency's pre-approval process, looking up to 200 contracts a day, and from 10,000 to 15,000 each year. New York is the only state where all state contracts need the comptroller's stamp of approval.
"I saw what worked and what didn't worked," she said. "I saw ones that were great and others that failed miserably."
Many bids are process-driven, Walters says, and bidders really have to understand the process to be successful.
"You have to be responsive to the needs of the state. You have to understand and walk in a state agency's shoes and know what they need," she said. "You have to be alert to what's down the road and respond to it quickly and early."
A lot of companies do things that really result in their not being able to bid on things because they're disqualified for some reason, Walters says. That's one area where she and her staff, including others with high-level executive and legislative experience, can be most helpful.
Though she has competition among the many law and lobbying firms that do similar work, Walters does not see them as a real treat to het firm. "I think some do it OK," she said, "But very few know how to strategically plan and market to the state."
In addition to for-profit and nonprofit contract bidding, The Walters Group also offers grant writing help.
In selling her expertise, Walters need not rely exclusively on her OSC experience. She has moved easily between the private and public sectors, and her public experience is not limited to the comptroller. Before joining the Comptroller's Office in 1997, she was a project director for Lockheed Martin IMS, a major national and New York state contractor that worked on electronic benefits transfer, child support collection and the Thruway's EasyPass system.
Before that, more public-sector experience under former Gov. Mario Cuomo, as director of the state's Office of Business Permits and Regulatory Assistance - now called the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform - and as a senior aide to two state Assembly speakers, Mel Miller and Stanley Fink.
Walters, 50, said she felt she had to start her firm now. Putting it off, she said, might have ended with her spending the rest of her career with the state, perhaps wondering at retirement is she would have succeeded has she tried.
A native of Ridgewood, N.J., Walters earned her bachelor's degree at Brown University in Providence, R.I., in 1975, then moved to Albany to take advantage of the opportunities she saw here. She got her MBA at Union College in 1984, at a time when there were few women in the program. Then, it mostly catered to General Electric engineers, she said.
Outside of work, Walters sits on the boards of several civic organizations, including The Albany Roundtable and the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society. She is a big fan of Albany's cultural and political climate as well as its proximity to bigger cities, mainly New York and Boston.
Walters, her husband and two teenage boys live in Loudonville. In her free time she is an avid reader of "tons of magazines," and fiction. Recently she has enjoyed "Good Poems," an anthology chosen by Garrison Keillor, host of public radio's "A Prairie Home Companion."
Paul F. Marr