Rudy Nessel co founded Interface in 1967. He has over 40 years of experience in federal marketing and sales consulting. He has produced over 1 billion dollars in contracts from Civilian and Department of Defense Agencies. Rudy has advised government and private sector executives on procurement strategies and continues to focus on bringing new technology to the federal agencies. This has included state of the art hardware for the warfighter to latest technology for toxic and hazardous waste remediation.
Prior to starting Interface, Rudy spent 5 years with The Trane Co. in Washington, D.C. as Corporate Manager of government relations where he supported 100 Trane regional offices in Federal government sales for environmental systems. In marketing efforts for Trane, it became readily apparent that many procurement opportunities were available for a diverse number of products and services. Thus, he created Interface, a marketing and sales firm, staffed with experienced professionals to serve firms with unique, best in class products and services.
After receiving his Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a MBA from Northwestern University, he served in the USAF for 3 years as a Special ProjectsOfficer, providing technical support to contracting officers for large prime contracts covering a wide range of technology areas.Additional duty covered design and construction of environmental systems to support Base Command infrastructure.
CLIENT SUCCESS CASE HISTORIES
Client success stories include taking a small environmental consulting firm and positioning them to compete and win the first landmark EPA environmental technical support (TAT) contract. This was the precursor of a billion dollar program(SUPERFUND) and, over a multi year span, Interface worked closely with our client pursuing follow on contracts resulting in the growth of our client from $5M to$100M and American Stock Exchange listing. EPA work was expanded to relatedGSA and DOD contracts and, concomitantly, commercial sales increased as the result of experience gained by the firm’s EPA experience.
These amazing results resulted fromInterface’s side by side working closely with our client to provide early identification of the opportunity, establishing a wiring diagram to identify key decision makers, working on the the proposal team and, after being short listed, participating in contract negotiations. The early establishment of relationships with our customer was a critical part of Interface’s role leading to our client’s success.
Interface has attended, on behalf of our client, meetings of the Association of Consulting Engineers sub group onEnvironment. Our role was to interact withEPA to help in the development of the next generation of federal procurement strategy for contracts to handle the exponential growth of the environmental program.On the products side of the federal market,Interface was able to lead the effort for our small business client to capture the largestNavy pump procurement for special titanium pumps ($17M) while competing with the largest pump manufacturers in the business. Again early identification of the opportunity, understanding the procurement regulations & process, and relationships with the customer were the keys provided by Interface.
Another example, and perhaps one of our most challenging success stories in terms of time and effort expended, was the sale of a proprietary water purification system to the Navy, which ultimately became a multimillion dollar program adopted by the entireNavy surface fleet. This points to the importance of understanding and relationships with all the key decision makers, since we were required to obtain medical approval from the Bureau ofMedicine for the chemical component, and approval of the hardware items from several offices in DC and the Naval SurfaceWarfare center in Philadelphia. Interface and our client spent 4 years working with the Navy on shipboard testing and obtaining approvals before we received our first order in 1978. Interface has continued marketing support with the manufacturer of the product with continuing sales to date in the multi million dollar range.