Christopher C. Hassler

President & CEO

Chris Hassler, President & CEO of Syndetics, founded this consulting firm to help clients win government business. Leveraging nearly 30 years of experience in business capture and proposal leadership positions, Hassler has developed a unique end-to-end campaign approach to strategy, business capture, and program assessment for large, complex government programs. Primarily serving companies in defense, aerospace, homeland security, intelligence, civil, and state sectors, Syndetics personnel have worked programs for ballistic missile defense systems, imaging and navigation satellite systems, ground stations, command and control systems, enterprise IT systems, classified intelligence community programs, precision strike weapons, shipbuilding, and next generation battlefield vehicles. He has provided program strategy support and executive counsel to virtually all major prime aerospace contractors.

Hassler's leadership transcends across the entire federal acquisition cycle, starting with market and business case development, followed by preliminary system architecture development, integrated schedule and risk management activities, proposal creation and leadership, cost estimating, and program start-up consulting. Hassler is a pioneer in introducing the use of an integrated framework for performance-based contracting and a best-value system engineering approach to win major weapon systems contracts. By helping his clients adapt to changing global competitive circumstances, he has personally assisted them in winning more than $60 billion in major programs. Additionally, he understands the source of current contractor performance challenges and has considerable experience in program restructuring. Hassler created a unique program assessment methodology that is used to determine program viability and to resolve the performance problems plaguing today's large programs.

Hassler served as a U.S. Naval officer in engineering and tactical operations billets as a Surface Warfare Officer and department head while on active duty. He retired as a Commander, USNR, while serving with Joint Forces Command and NATO Joint Striking Fleet Atlantic, where he supported numerous NATO exercises and studies on the defense of Europe. He has studied the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction from a government and industry perspective.

Hassler was raised in State College, PA. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD with a BS degree in Engineering Management and Technology and from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA with a MS degree in Information Technologies.

DON J. BROWN

Vice President, Win Process Improvement

Don Brown serves on the Syndetics Executive Leadership team and is responsible for helping clients improve their win rate for new business.  Using his unique skill sets developed during a 44-year career in the Aerospace and Defense industry, he guides our clients through discovering, qualifying, cataloging, and leveraging their company’s best practices and lessons learned across their business acquisition processes introducing new best practices where appropriate. These activities lead to improvements that result in significant company resource savings by developing more robust and better qualified bid-pipes. This significantly increases Bid & Proposal productivity and ultimately results in higher win rates for new business.

Before joining Syndetics in 2009, Mr. Brown worked for the Northrop Grumman Corporation. As the Vice President for Strategic Capture at Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, he created the NG initiative “Achieving Corporate Excellence in Business Development” (ACE-BD) that defined and developed the improved Northrop Grumman Corporate Business Acquisition Process, the Corporate Business Development organization that did not previously exist. He also led the design and construction of the new state-of-the-art proposal center at Mission Systems headquarters. Additionally, he implemented a Position-to-Win (PTW) professional development career path within the sector, and provided leadership in the development of Business Development Boot Camp training across the organization. Following his work at Mission Systems, Mr. Brown served briefly as a senior executive consultant to Northrop Grumman Information Systems.

Prior to Northrop Grumman, Mr. Brown enjoyed a successful 38-year career at Lockheed Martin where he held a succession of increasingly important positions ranging from administrative, to District Manager, to business unit director, and culminating as Director Program Support and Best Practices on the Lockheed Martin Corporate Business Development staff. While in that position he led the effort to capture, qualify, and catalog the entire corporation’s best practices and subsequently developed their process for collecting and validating win-loss lessons learned and applying them to future captures. He co-chaired the corporation’s PTW working group, as well as, the highly successful Lockheed Martin Association of Proposal Professionals organization. He also had responsibilities in several highly classified areas.

Mr. Brown was raised in Cressona, PA and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is Lean/Six Sigma qualified and a graduate of the Lockheed Martin Senior Leadership Institute. He resides in Central Virginia.

GLEN O. WOODS

Vice President, Research & Market Assessment

Glen Woods serves on the Syndetics Executive Leadership team and is responsible for all corporate efforts to identify, research, assess, and validate business opportunities in the Federal market. He directs Syndetics’ assessments of market trends through examination of Federal budgets and the constant monitoring of complex acquisition system laws and rules changes. He brings extensive knowledge of the Washington DC market and the aviation and aerospace industry through three decades of experience in the United States Navy, industry, and government relations.

Prior to joining Syndetics, Mr. Woods spent nine years working in the Federal government relations field directing business development and legislative activities for a broad clientele of firms specializing in federal government affairs and legislative counsel. He provided successful federal sector business development and legislative strategies for clients in various markets including heavy manufacturing, product life cycle management, DoD Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), and IT secure communications.

Mr. Woods served 23 years as a U.S. Navy P-3 pilot conducting maritime patrol and anti-submarine operations in every operational theatre around the globe with his final flying tour as Commanding Officer of Patrol Squadron TEN. Prior to retiring as a Captain, Woods served four years in Navy legislative affairs where he represented the Navy's interests to Congress including enactment of the National Defense Authorization Bills. Mr. Woods is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and received a Master of Information Systems from Virginia Tech.