How she sold a federal contracting firm after building it to $100M revenue

Lauren Wittenberg Weiner calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur.”

She founded WWC Global in 2005 after she quit her job as a policy analyst at the White House to join her husband on military orders in Italy. “I was told that military spouses… were not allowed to apply for or obtain a professional-level job while stationed in Italy,” she said on her website.

That didn’t sit well with Weiner, so she created her own company: WWC Global.

The federal government-focused consulting firm began as a two-person team and grew organically, employing military spouses around the world. In 13 years, Weiner grew the company to $15 million in annual revenue.

Then, after winning two massive government contracts, WWC Global’s annual revenue jumped to $100 million.

“I got to a point where we had grown the company well beyond anything we had anticipated, and the next phase of growth was going to take effort that I just was not excited about,” she said. “With that, I thought the company deserved a path forward that didn’t require me as the CEO.”

She began looking for a buyer.

Building WWC Global: “We didn’t follow the same playbook”

From the beginning, WWC Global focused on supporting government customers in “putting good government into practice,” as Weiner put it. This included strategic planning, financial management, application development and statistical analysis.

WWC Global grew into a team of around 350 employees over the span of 17 years. The firm served customers across the national security and federal civilian spaces, including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

But WWC Global didn’t follow the typical government contracting growth playbook. Rather than bidding the lowest, moving the fastest and scaling the most aggressively, Weiner focused on following the rules — and understanding them better than anyone else.

“At various times in the GovCon market, the pendulum swung to low cost over best value, and we were not a low-cost provider,” she said. “We knew the procurement regulations better than anyone and could guide our customers to make sure they were able to procure what they actually needed.”

That approach supported steady, revenue-funded growth — and landed the company a history-making contract. In 2018, WWC Global won the largest-ever contract awarded to a woman-owned business: $200 million over five years to support a global military training and exercise program with special operations forces, including the Navy SEALs and Green Berets.

Within three years of that contract, WWC Global had scaled to $100 million in annual revenue — and grown into the largest woman-owned federal contracting firm in Tampa, FL.

What it takes to grow a profitable company to 350 employees

As Weiner scaled WWC Global from two employees to 350, she practiced thoughtful authenticity — “authenticity that keeps the core of you but recognizes the social and professional context in which we all live and work,” she described in her TEDx Talk.

She considers it her superpower and said it helped her build credibility, strengthen her teams and improve outcomes.

Weiner also welcomed feedback and had always surrounded herself with people who weren’t afraid to challenge her. This includes her team, mentors and one of her biggest influencers: her dad. Of course, she didn’t always implement their feedback — but she did always hear it.

“If you don’t feel comfortable in that, you’re never going to be able to grow into that next layer,” she told They Got Acquired.

Finding the right buyer with the right vision for WWC Global

Once WWC Global reached $100 million in annual revenue, Weiner knew it was her time to step aside as CEO, so she began exploring her options. If she were to sell, she wanted to find a firm that was focused on long-term growth and credibility.

But she didn’t have to find them — the buyer found her. Command Holdings was looking to expand its footprint and reached out to WWC Global about an acquisition. Command Holdings is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and manages a portfolio of government consulting firms.

“In talking to [Command Holdings CEO] Jon, he really saw a vision for a tribally owned 8(a) company that was different, that was really long-term focused, that had long-term credibility that was so critical to our success and core to who we are,” Weiner told Tribal Business News.

She cited the tribe’s “Seven Generations” approach, which considers the impact of enterprise decisions on the next seven generations of tribal members.

Weiner worked with an investment banker and analyst to help guide the sale. For her, M&A was a completely new world — with new rules. She leaned on experts around her, especially her analyst, “but it was still extremely scary to be that out of my comfort zone,” she said.

For one, she didn’t realize just how consequential the different pieces of the deal were.

“We structured the deal in a way that made the most sense for us — our upsides and our risk tolerance — and really worked to figure out how much we wanted an upside on an earnout versus how much we wanted certainty,” Weiner said, though she couldn’t disclose details.

“I am very happy with the choices we made, particularly given what’s happened in the industry,” she said, nodding to uncertainty in the sector.

The process from LOI to close took about eight months.

Life after the sale, plus practical advice for founders

As part of the deal, Weiner joined the Command Holdings executive team, along with WWC principals Donna Honeycutt and Heidi Snell.

According to their LinkedIn profiles, Weiner left Command Holdings in 2024 after two years as chief revenue officer, Honeycutt left in 2023 after a year as chief business integration and risk officer, and Snell still serves as the chief management officer as of early 2026.

Following the sale, Weiner wrote a best-selling book, “Unruly: Deconstruct the Rules, Defy the Norms, and Define Your Success.” She became a speaker and GovCon consultant, spending time with her kids before they head off to college.

She also recently took a vacation with her family to Mexico — and, for the first time in 25 years, didn’t work at all.

“It’s been over three years since we sold, and one of the greatest gifts of that time has been discovering who I am without the CEO title,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

For founders looking to sell, Weiner shared some practical advice: “Go talk to three to four investment bankers about what you’d need to do to get your company ready for sale, at least five years before you think you want to sell.”

The caveat: You don’t need to apply all their recommendations. Weiner didn’t — some of the advice she received ran counter to the culture she’d built at WWC Global.

“But it allowed us to catalog everything we did that wasn’t aligned with their advice so we could use it in the discussions with buyers,” she explained. “They could see what we had invested in that wasn’t typical of firms expecting to sell and allowed us to negotiate for a higher valuation than the baseline EBITDA would have suggested.”