Chris Hamm talks with Soraya Correa, President & CEO at NIB, Former Chief Procurement Officer & Executive of the Department of Homeland Security, about practical acquisition reform. From building the DHS Procurement Innovation Lab “without asking permission” to creating faster, more outcome-driven evaluations. Soraya also shares how she now advances mission through employment as CEO of National Industries for the Blind.
In this episode of Optimize, host Chris Hamm sits down with Soraya Correa—former Chief Procurement Officer and Senior Procurement Executive at the Department of Homeland Security—to get specific about what it actually takes to modernize acquisition from the inside. Soraya walks through her career path across procurement and program leadership, then explains how she launched the DHS Procurement Innovation Lab by focusing on speed, outcomes, and the flexibilities already available “within the four corners of the FAR.”
They dig into what “top cover” looks like in practice: letting contracting officers try new approaches, learning from failure, and sharing repeatable playbooks across government. Soraya also addresses the risk environment leaders face today—and why she believes the acquisition workforce (not legislation) drives the most meaningful reform.
Finally, Soraya shares what she’s building now as CEO of the National Industries for the Blind (NIB)—supporting the AbilityOne ecosystem, expanding services like closeout support, and creating real economic independence for Americans who are blind or visually impaired.
00:04 — Welcome + why Soraya’s DHS acquisition role mattered
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
00:59 — Soraya’s career path: contract specialist → CPO (and why it took 40 years)
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
03:35 — Moving to the program side: learning IT and building acquisition muscle
07:32 — The Procurement Innovation Lab origin story: “I didn’t ask for permission”
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
09:47 — Starting with closeouts: removing friction and cleaning up the backlog
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
10:40 — “Show me” evaluations: using practical tests (including “bad code”) to assess vendors
12:10 — Coalition of the willing: sharing playbooks across agencies (and why reform starts with practitioners)
14:20 — Do leaders still provide “top cover” for innovation in 2026?
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
17:50 — “The answer can’t be no”: partnering with political leadership, legal, IT, and CFO
21:52 — The most unexpected DHS buy (and what it taught her about mission support)
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
25:00 — What NIB does: AbilityOne, Skillcraft, and building employment pathways
29:14 — Marketing services like closeouts and accessibility at scale
Transcript s04-Soraya Correa Th…
32:01 — Wrap-up and where to connect
Title: The Answer Can’t Be No: Inside Real Acquisition Reform
Host – Chris Hamm
Guest: Soraya Correa, former chief procurement officer and senior procurement executive of the Department of Homeland Security
Summary:
Host Chris Hamm talks with Soraya Correa, former Chief Procurement Officer and Senior Procurement Executive at DHS and now CEO of National Industries for the Blind (NIB). Soraya shares how she moved between procurement and program roles, why she created DHS’s Procurement Innovation Lab without asking permission, her belief that only the acquisition community can truly reform acquisition, and how NIB creates meaningful jobs and independence for people who are blind or visually impaired.
Chris Hamm (00:04.27)
Greetings everyone. is Chris Hamm here on the Optimize podcast by Visible Thread. Today we are joined by a Titan in the acquisition space, the former chief procurement officer and senior procurement executive of the Department of Homeland Security, Soraya Correa. Welcome, Soraya.
Soraya Correa (00:23.395)
Thank you, Chris. It's a pleasure to join you.
Chris Hamm (00:25.806)
So we've known each other for a while, crossed in the same circles. One of the few people that I'm getting a chance to interview that had more people and more responsibility than me. So my first question for you is like, how did you get there? You know, the head of DHS Acquisition is a gigantic job, know, like one that probably no one aspired to at the start. So can you give me like a quick rundown of like, you know, how you're to...
Soraya Correa (00:44.78)
Bye.
Soraya Correa (00:52.374)
Yeah.
Chris Hamm (00:55.256)
career progression and then we'll talk about that.
Soraya Correa (00:59.491)
Sure. So first of all, I retired from federal service after 40 years. So that should tell you something about how long it took me to get there. No, but anyway, my early career, I was always in procurement, rose from being a contract specialist to a contracting officer and then taking on supervisory roles. But mid-career, I left NASA and I joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service and I went into IT as an acquisitions manager.
basically a program manager. And I did that for like the next 10 years of my career. And then of course, 9-11 happened and DHS was established. And so when INS was merged into DHS, I'm one of the original plank holders, I was part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And I was in IT working on financial systems. And I was considering coming back into procurement, had the opportunity to become the head of contracting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Did that for about a year and a half. And then on a whim, I applied for one of the headquarters positions to create what was called the Office of Procurement Operations, another head of contracting activity. Did that for the next five years. I was selected. And I did that for the next five years. Then I left procurement again, went to the program side at Citizenship and Immigration Services. And I was contemplating retirement when the phone rang. And I was asked if I would be interested in becoming the Chief Procurement Officer.
I could have retired or I could have done what I did, which was say, boy, would I love to do this because my focus was to make procurement better. And I really wanted to take on that responsibility as large and complex and difficult as it was because I knew that there was a better way. And so I was excited to take on the role, to join the team. I knew probably about
probably about 60 to 70 % of the staff that was there because I'd interacted with them throughout my time at DHS. But it was just an exciting time to be there, to have this opportunity, and to really kind of turn the ship around a bit.
Chris Hamm (03:06.85)
That's interesting. And I didn't know that you had moved between acquisition and program. So I'm going to connect a thread here because it helps me understand why you did something later. So the first time you left acquisition and went over to program, were you like, voluntold to do it or were you just like, you know, I want to figure out what's going on on the business or the mission side? What was the spark there?
Soraya Correa (03:35.181)
So the spark there was actually my customer at NASA, because I was at NASA and I was doing IT acquisitions, my IT customer moved over to INS to become the CIO there. And after he was there for about three months, my phone rang and they invited me to join their team. They said, hey, we'd love to have you come join us. We're trying to redesign our acquisition program. We think you'd be a great fit.
So it was really funny because when they first called, I thought they were talking about going into the procurement side. said, no, I'm happy here. I want to stay here. And they said, no, no, no. We want you on the IT side. It took me like 24 hours to agree to do it. I mean, I had to think about it. But I said, wow, what a great opportunity. And of course, know, IT was big at that time. I'm talking about roughly the early 90s. So really, IT was gaining a lot of momentum. I said, well, you know, the worst that could happen, I don't like it. And I come back to procurement, right? Loved it.
I loved it because, you know, first of all, was INS and we were doing a lot of really interesting thing, building a lot of systems for the board patrol for immigration and custom, what soon became Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But it was just a great time to be there and it was kind of like a ground up operation. I was really establishing their acquisition program. So it was just fun and I learned so much and, you know, it was hard because I had to learn IT.
had to develop my program management skills. I I always tell people that when you're in contracting, you do pick up quite a few program management skills. You you're leading teams, you're negotiating. mean, all of this is a lot about your soft skills. You know, your willingness to learn, but also those soft skills, how you communicate, how you interact with people, how you establish schedules, how you manage, et cetera. So, but it was just an exciting time. We were doing some really interesting things at the organization.
They had brought in people from a lot of different places because the organization was growing. And I was still interacting with contracting because I was in charge of the acquisition program. So I was responsible for establishing a lot of their large contract vehicles from the program side, but I was also working with the procurement side and my knowledge of procurement certainly helped quite a bit in that area.
Chris Hamm (05:46.446)
Well, you may not realize this, but I have had the exact inverse of that experience. I grew up as the IT side. I grew up as the IT program side and then had to learn acquisition in order to help get the job done. And that's, it helps me understand when you actually got into the big seat, when you actually like had the authority to then drive how acquisition to launch the idea of driving effective communication with industry and then with
Soraya Correa (05:56.994)
That's it, Mr.
Chris Hamm (06:16.429)
in your own acquisition team. So that makes total sense now.
Soraya Correa (06:20.362)
Exactly. And look, I think you would agree that the skill sets that you had as an IT manager translated into that acquisition side. You might have had to learn some of the technicalities, right? Like I had to learn the technicalities, but the soft skills, those inherent skills that are needed to effectively manage an organization, to lead a team of people, to engage with others, those are the skills that are needed. And I think, you know, once you hone those skills, you probably take on...
I'm never going to call myself an IT expert, but I certainly knew enough to be dangerous. Ask my former CIOs, they loved it.
Chris Hamm (06:58.254)
Alright, so I want to move on to the procurement innovation lab. So the pill so
The idea comes out, there's suddenly interest in acquisition innovation inside of, know, OPP and OMB. Was like your first attempt, you like people say, yeah, we should totally do that or like was it like what's she talking about? Like what was the like the immediate reaction to, we're not just gonna like run acquisition for DHS, we're also going to teach everybody how to be innovative. What happened there?
Soraya Correa (07:32.671)
So I'll let you in on a little secret. I didn't ask for permission. I didn't say, Mother, may I? Because whenever you ask for permission, you know how that goes, right? So what I did was when I joined the DHS Office of the Chief Procurement Officer as the CPO, about two months into the job, I called in my acquisition policy experts and I said, I have this idea and I want to implement this idea and...
I don't think we need a lot of people because we're going to use our very own contracting officers to do this. And I said, my idea is this. I want to stand up a team to help think of ways that we can promote efficiency and effectiveness in procurement, speed up the process, make it better, help our program officers make better decisions in the acquisition side. And we need to do this working within the four corners of the FARC.
Because we don't have time for legislative change. That's crazy. I don't want to deal with regulations. We got to find every flexibility in the FAR to do this. As my acquisition policy team, that's your job, to find us the flexibilities. So I started with one person. That's literally what the Procurement Innovation Lab started with. We decided to call it the Procurement Innovation Lab because it was an area for experimentation. And my concept was this. I'm going to give top cover to any contracting officer who wants to try something new, something different.
We'll vet what you're trying to do, make sure that you're not running afoul of the regulations, and then we're going to let you run with it, and then we're just going to be checking in with you and helping you out, making sure that you have the right conversations with the right people, et cetera. If you're successful, you get to go out and teach people what you did. We're going to tout your documentation. We're going to host webinars to teach other people to do what you did, whatever you did, and let them improve upon it. But if you fail, I take the hit for that. That's my job.
As Chief Procurement Officer, I will stand before you and be your champion no matter what. And by the way, if you fail and you're doing a really good job, you're probably going to get rewarded anyway because we learn from failure. And I actually use the word fail, which a lot of people don't like to use in government, as you very well know. So I kind of stood it up quietly in a little corner. We started doing this. And we started out, believe it or not, with
Soraya Correa (09:47.863)
some of our closeout procedures, trying to streamline how we did closeouts, especially for fixed price orders where the final payment had already been made, but the order was still open because nobody had time to do the closeouts. We decided to do in-mass closings, and that's how we kind of got started. From that, we had people now wanting to join the team, and so we started detailing people in. One day I'm talking to my boss, and I'd forgotten that I didn't say Mother May. I actually said,
Hey, the Procurement Innovation Lab is going really well. We're going to host our first webinar." And he goes, what's the Procurement Innovation Lab? And that was the beginning of it. So, but I actually, behind the scenes, had already started talking to people about what I was doing. Talking to my CIO because one of the first procurements that we did was with our CIO shop. I invited them in and said, if you could evaluate proposals the way you think is best, tell me what you would do.
And he said, well, I'd give them a test. I'd actually, you we were talking about software and he said, I'd give them software with bad code and let them find it. And that would tell me if they know what the heck they're doing and then ask them about their processes and stuff. So we did a procurement that way. We actually did a procurement that way. And it was very successful. And my evaluators were done with their evaluations in less than two weeks and they evaluated five proposals. It was two weeks and it was five proposals. So.
Here to four, it had taken three to four months, people had to be sequestered in a room, blah, blah, blah, blah. The other thing that we did was started documenting all these processes and then sharing them out. And that's where OFPP came in because I went to OFPP and said, hey, look at what we're doing within the four corners of the FAR, and here's how we're trying to do it. And we think we should set up a little website so we can share this with other agencies and blah, blah, blah, blah, the rest was history. I started talking about this at the CAO council meetings, the chief acquisition officer council meetings.
But I also started reaching out to my counterparts and saying, hey, here's what we're doing, and here's what we're trying, and here are some thoughts that we have, and how do you guys do this? Because I really believe that what makes our community strong and what will move the needle forward on true acquisition reform is when we, the acquisition community, come together and work together. In other words, when we're talking to one another, sharing ideas, making sure that
Soraya Correa (12:10.157)
we really understand what this ecosystem really looks like. Who has the most complex procurements? Who has the routine and recurring? How are you doing things? What kind of automation are you doing? And that, from the Procurement Innovation Lab, we went on to other collaborations, including implementing, know, RPA, what is it, robotic process automation, and some AI tools that people weren't calling AI tools at the time. But that's how we continued expanding. And I was always looking for...
My counterparts are there to create a coalition of the willing. Because I still believe to this day, the only people that can reform acquisition is us. It is not going to be legislation on the Hill. It's not. We take care of that. Because we're the experts. We know the business. And we know the missions that we serve.
Chris Hamm (12:56.206)
That's an interesting...
like corresponding same time when in my organization we were doing similar work and you would, came up with this website and you know, you're giving stuff to the, you know, to Matthew Blum at OFPP and like creating a website, the acquisition, like innovation periodic table of elements. And I'm sitting there thinking, I hear him here. I am running a business that does all this cool stuff and she's giving away all my secrets. Like all of the methods that we're doing, we're sharing for free for everybody. And so like the, evaluation methodologies, like this is like absolutely one
of my biggest pet peeves. The default, the way that everyone else does it, automatically is companies have to write how they're going to do a job, like written proposals. The slightly better way is oral presentations. Prove to me that you know what you're doing by giving me a presentation. The best way is show me. Show me that you know how to do it. To build an acquisition environment where the people who are making the decision and the subject matter experts who in the government can actually
Soraya Correa (13:43.756)
Exactly.
Soraya Correa (13:47.267)
Exactly.
Show me.
Chris Hamm (14:00.496)
feel comfortable designing that kind of acquisition. That only exists if we start where you started. You gave them permission to do it. So it is now 2025. I am not in that chair. You are not in that chair.
Soraya Correa (14:11.423)
Exactly.
Chris Hamm (14:20.238)
Do you believe that the workforce today has that level of top cover to drive innovation, even though all the rules just change, but you could be more innovative. do you think there's presently the person who's ready to do a really creative, me a solution kind of acquisition in the spring of 2026?
Soraya Correa (14:41.539)
think there are pockets out there. I'm not going to say it's widespread across the government, but I think more and more leaders are coming in and saying, we got to do it better. This is what we got to do. And if you think about the whole revolutionary far overhaul, which I'm a proponent of, I certainly applaud the efforts. And of course, I know a lot of the players that are working on this, and we did get a collection of some of the best minds, and certainly in the background.
A lot of organizations like the Procurement Roundtable, ACT-IAC, etc., NCMA, we're all engaged in the background because we know this business and we lived it when we had to work within the four corners of the FAR as it was written. But we know what true reform takes. And when people like us, who worked on both sides of the house, by the way, we were customers of procurement and then we ran procurement.
We understand what those challenges are. It's not a little story or an anecdote that somebody told you. It's we lived it. We lived the experience. I sat in evaluation rooms for months at a time reviewing written proposals. That's why I said there's got to be a better way to do this. That was like, it was killer, right? When you were working 24 by 7 to get a report out. That's craziness. And then you wrote these big reports.
so that somebody could then dissect them in a printout. It was nuts, right? And I'm like, and in all this, we're not talking to the vendor. And I sat in organizations where they told me I shouldn't meet with, when I was procurement, that I shouldn't meet with vendors. They're just gonna waste your time. And I'm like, well, then who do they talk to? We're the contracting community, right? So, you know, people like us who lived that experience wanted to make change. Many people that are coming in,
want to do things differently. They're not going to want to be engaged in the crazy bureaucratic stuff. Will they have the appetite for the level of risk that you have to assume to provide that top cover? Because you have, there's risk, right? In this day and age where we live in a 24 by 7 news cycle where they don't care and they publish your name and your date of birth and where you live and all that good stuff, it's scary.
Soraya Correa (17:00.203)
I think it's scary for some people. Me, I'm never scared of anything, and I know you're not scared of much. But I think it is a little bit scary because reputations can be hurt with this 24 by 7 news cycle. So I do wonder if the leadership that we're bringing in, the folks that are rising up, will feel comfortable taking some of the risks that you and I were willing to take. And that's the question.
Chris Hamm (17:25.814)
Yeah, I've always always wanted the life, the lifelong career civil servant sitting next to the political appointee saying, here's the path. Like, I, whatever you want to do, I'll help you do it. But like, you got to lean on me for like, you can't just sign this contract here, you know, like you've got there, there's a there's a framework that you can operate and I can help you get there. And making sure that that person is in that seat.
Soraya Correa (17:50.446)
But, and by the way, that's what I did as chief procurement officer and even as an HCA. I always, when the new leadership came in, the political leadership came in, I always made myself available to them. And, you know, one of the things that I used to tell my staff all the time was the answer can't be no. If they have a need, we gotta figure it out. It may not be that way, but we gotta figure it out. And so many times I would go and say,
Talk to me, tell me what you're trying to do. Help me understand. What do you need? What are you looking for? And then we tried to figure out how to do it within the four corners of the FAR. And there were times that I would have to explain why we couldn't do certain things or why we shouldn't do certain things. Because sometimes it's not even that you can't. It's that you probably shouldn't, right? Because of the politics of the day and so on. But the other thing that I always did was engage my legal counsel. I always...
tried to create a good working relationship with our legal counsel where it was understood, you're giving me advice, it's your job to give me advice, and it is my job to make business decisions, and sometimes I'm not gonna agree with your advice, but we're gonna talk it through to see how we can figure out what's the risk that you're concerned about, how do I mitigate it, and so on and so forth. But I spent probably the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years of my career working with politicals.
and working for and with politicals. And what I always tried to educate my staff was, if they have a requirement, they got funds, we gotta figure out how to do it. So don't say no. Say, let me take a look at this. Let's talk about what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it. And let me give you some options on how to do this. And that was the other thing. You gotta give people options. It's like anything in your life, right? When somebody comes to your house to repair something, you wanna know.
How much is this thing gonna cost and how can we do it? Can we do it another way and how much disruption, right? You gotta ask these kinds of questions. It's like buying in your personal life. And that's the approach that I take, a very common sense approach, but a very collaborative approach. I always, the other people that I always had by my side was IT. Because almost everything we buy these days has IT in it, right? And so the other folks that I strongly partnered with was IT and of course the CFO because they're the money, right? But making sure that I...
Soraya Correa (20:09.783)
hold in the right elements to provide a total solution for the customer. Because unfortunately, sometimes we work in stovepipes and that's what makes us look bad. We forget to bring in other elements that can help us out. And I really try to be good about using that entire CXO suite, all my colleagues, to bring them to the conversation to hopefully give a total solution, especially for political appointees, because that's what they want.
They, you know, I used to joke around, I used go, they got a little timestamp on their forehead, right? They're there for a limited amount of time to accomplish something. That's just the way it is, right? They're appointed for a limited amount of time because we don't know when administrations are going to change and so on. And so they're trying to get certain things done and you have to understand that and you have to understand the mission of the agency and their priorities. And then you can work through that and you bring your team members along. Safety in numbers, by the way.
Chris Hamm (21:06.254)
I want ask you one more question about DHS before we move on. And it's more of a fun, unexpected question. So at GSA, one of the fun anecdotes that I discovered in the middle was in the event that we find a shipwreck and there's actually buried gold off the coast of the United States, GSA is responsible for acquiring that gold and then interacting with the other country for buried treasure. That's like one of those like weirdly assigned
things for GSA. What was that for you at DHS? Somebody came to you and said, we're buying X. And you're like, we do what? like, so you're like, we're responsible for that?
Soraya Correa (21:52.247)
So believe it or not, this is a true story, when you're training law enforcement, one of the tools that you use is actually former criminals that have been reformed who can teach you the ins and outs. And I remember sitting at headquarters and getting a requisition to buy the services of an individual who had been a white supremacist.
right, that was in those organizations to provide training for certain law enforcement organizations within the department on how to infiltrate those groups and how to deal with them. I was like shocked, right? White supremacists, I'm Hispanic, and of course the individual that brought the matter to me was a black male and the contracting officer was a black female coming to their Hispanic chief of care officer. And I'm like,
Okay, I gotta go talk to somebody about this. And we got it resolved, but it was hilarious to me. I was like, if I told somebody the story, they probably wouldn't believe me, right? It would work that way, but yeah. But it's interesting what you learn when you support organizations that have the law enforcement mission or the emergency management mission. know, FEMA, who takes a lot of hits for things that isn't really fair to them, but FEMA, when they go out on an operation,
They're not out there on their own. They're bringing in the rest of the federal government. You have SBA. You have commerce. I mean, you have everybody, energy, everybody. I didn't know the magnitude of that. I didn't really understand it until I went out to support one of the hurricanes. And I didn't really understand that all these agencies come to bear, especially under a big disaster, to bring resources to bear to help out, to help the local community, not to mention the local community's activities, right? The state level, the city level.
So I just found it fascinating all the time that, you know, you didn't really understand how deeply and how important it was to have these established relationships with all these organizations. And that was what DHS was created to do, believe it or not, to interact with all these other agencies. And as much as people would like to criticize DHS, I think they did a pretty good job of it considering, you know,
Soraya Correa (24:16.363)
what hasn't happened in this country since 9-11. Nobody ever thinks about that, right?
Chris Hamm (24:21.954)
Yeah. So you graduated. You, like me, are now a federal retiree.
You still had a little bit more in you, a little bit more work to do. So you are now the CEO of the National Industries for the Blind, or NIB, which I think a lot of our audience will have very little understanding of like the real scale and capability of the organization. So can you give me, you know, a good five minutes on like what is NIB? What are you guys doing? How awesome is it?
Soraya Correa (25:00.641)
Yeah, so National Industries for the Blind, NIB, what we're here to do is really work with our associated nonprofit agencies to create employment opportunities for individuals who are blind or visually impaired within the definition of blindness. What we do is we work with a program in the government called the Ability One Program, which is a result of the Javis Wagner O'Dea Act of 1938.
But the act basically said we're going to create opportunities for individuals who are blind or visually impaired to be able to find job opportunities, to work in the environment. And we do that by making products. Skillcraft is our brand. We hold a patent on Skillcraft products. Most of our products and services are Skillcraft. We made the first U.S. government pen. You know those pretty little black pens that say U.S. government? That's us, and that's a Skillcraft product. Today we have thousands of products.
We do everything from not only office products, copier paper, janitorial products, including solutions as well as tape, little sticky notes, you name it, we make it, right? And we also provide services. In fact, one of the things that I learned when I came on board, we have a huge closeout services activity that we support.
both for DOD and other federal agencies. DLA, the Defense Logistics Agency, is one of our largest customers, and so is GSA, your former alma mater. But we also work with a lot of other federal agencies. So we are what's called a central nonprofit agency, and we're probably one of the finest examples of a public-private partnership, where we work in partnership with the AbilityOne program to find business opportunities, identify
products or services that could be put on a procurement list for our nonprofit agencies to support the federal government. We do that here in the United States, so we are employing Americans and American citizens who are blind or visually impaired. And here's the thing, we're creating taxpayers. We're helping people come off of those disability roles, if you will, those federal subsistence programs and work and have independence and have a life.
Soraya Correa (27:24.333)
be able to buy a home, send their kids to school, et cetera. Our counterpart organization, Source America, was established later after us, because we've been around for 85 plus years. Subsequently, the J WAD Act was updated to include other disabilities. Source America does other disabilities. So they do a lot of building maintenance services, know, cleaning, food service, et cetera. But we work together, we work in partnership with the Ability One program.
to find these opportunities to make sure people are employed. Something people don't know about blindness specifically and disabilities in general is over, I think the number is over 50 % of people who are eligible for employment are unemployed that have disabilities. That's huge. That is a huge number. And we've got to work on fixing that. And how we do that is through the programs that we establish. So I like to describe NIV.
as an employment program. And I'll share a little secret with you. As a procurement officer, I was very familiar with the AbilityOne program because we used it at DHS like you did at GSA. But a lot of times we don't know the inner workings of the program, right, how they do things behind the scenes. It was a huge eye opener. And I've gone out and visited over 30 of our nonprofit agencies and seen the work that they do. And their warehouses look like anybody else's manufacturing facility. The only difference is
75 % of their employees, 75 % or more of their employees are typically blind or low vision. So it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see them do the work and it's fascinating to talk to the people and know how you're affecting their lives. And for people who are dedicated to service, I couldn't think of a greater mission to serve than this one, other than the one that I served in the federal government.
Chris Hamm (29:14.966)
is an amazing program and I remember the first time I had heard about the closeout service because it is something that know GSA was doing. I'm wondering how do you market that, how do you make like you know a government buyer aware of the possibility? So I mean obviously we know about the program like you go you reach the far here's like the mandatory sources here's the process for us to follow.
Do you need to have like an outreach function that like shows people what is possible? Because there are probably millions of closeouts that need to be addressed government-wide that would just like clean up the books, like, you know, finally get a clean accounting statement somewhere.
Soraya Correa (29:48.853)
Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. So yeah, so now we have a marketing and business development team. have marketing and communications as well as a business development team. And their job is to go out and meet with federal agencies and make them aware of all the products and services that we provide. So whether it's closeouts, digitization services, we do a lot of document digitization and document destruction services, whether we even do 508 compliance, accessibility services. So we go out and sometimes we market together with Source America.
Sometimes we go to trade shows, those kinds of things, set up our little booth and help people learn about who we are and what we do. And of course our nonprofit agencies go out in their local communities and educate. Because here's what our nonprofit agencies do. They run a business to hire these people and have them working and do this work on behalf of the government. And we do work for commercial entities. But they also provide services in their local community to help people who have disabilities adapt to the environment.
learn the work environment, learn how to use equipment that enables them, the technologies that enables them. A lot of our folks who are blind rely on lot of good technologies. We run call centers. We do all kinds of stuff and we do it at the federal, state, and local level as well as for commercial entities. So like any other business operation, we do have marketing, communications, and of course business development folks. We also have engineering teams, by the way, that help adapt the environment to support.
the individuals with disabilities. And these engineering teams go out and visit our nonprofit agencies, provide advice, assistance, help them see ways that they can help our individuals who are blind adapt to the work environment. And here's the thing that I always tell folks, know, disability doesn't mean inability. And actually, if you want to meet some really innovative folks, come talk to people with disabilities, because they have to adapt. They face challenges all the time.
Soraya Correa (31:52.737)
And so they have to figure out how to overcome those challenges. And so they come up with innovative ways to do that.
Chris Hamm (32:01.492)
is an amazing opportunity for you to work in that environment. I just want to thank you for continuing your service to the country and for hiring more Americans in this area. That's just great. Just awesome job. This has been the Optimized Podcast from Visible Thread. I thank our guest here, Soraya. And if you are interested in the services, I'm sure you can find Soraya's contact information through the LinkedIn posting on this.
Soraya Correa (32:18.115)
Thank you.
Soraya Correa (32:28.289)
Please!
Chris Hamm (32:31.358)
episode. So thanks everybody and we'll see you in two weeks. That was really cool. That was a good, that was, that was a, yeah.
Soraya Correa (32:41.282)
good straight conversation right?