Why can’t the Virginia APEX Accelerator hire more counselors? I would like to speak to my counselor more often!
Virginia APEX Accelerator has around 2000 client companies participating in counseling annually with even our most efficient counselors, working full time, counseling between 200-300 clients per year. Assistance includes the follow-up meetings necessary to resolve more complex challenges, and many of our counselors are part time, which limits the frequency of appointments available to individual clients. The typical company averages between 1.5 to 3.3 hours of counseling assistance annually with some seeking to resolve very specific challenges, and others are looking for overall strategic advice or direction. The most successful client companies are motivated to pair our training with advice from counselors for overall direction, then run with the resulting homework toward success. Strategic direction counseling appointments should be compared to an annual physical with a primary care doctor: sometimes the appointment requires a follow-up, but the onus is on the user to take care of the day to day implementation.
It would be ideal to hire more counselors, but the limits on federal funding as a statewide program are set into law, and staffing cannot grow beyond those constraints*. Training and webinar content is used to reduce the burden on counselors repeatedly teaching introductory information to an audience of one during a counseling session. Unfortunately half as many clients participate in training as our counseling. When clients come into a meeting unprepared, it only slows the forward momentum for that company’s trajectory toward winning government contracting work. We want to emphasize that the training and webinars are the basis of understanding a topic, and the counseling sessions allow someone to dig into the specifics of the company situation/industry: Laying the proper foundation for GovCon
*See 10 USC 4955(a)
