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SR-428A

Mrs. Fonda Lindfors New

Chief Executive Officer, QRI, Inc.

1 11/29/12 | Testimony to US Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship - Creating Jobs and Growing the

Economy: Legislative Proposals to Strengthen the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem | Fonda Lindfors New, QRI

Fonda Lindfors New, CEO

QRI (Quaternary Resource Investigations)

13588 Florida Blvd.

Baton Rouge, LA 70819

Phone: (225) 292.1400

flin@qri.com; http://www.qri.com

29 November 2012

Testimony to US Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship

“Creating Jobs and Growing the Economy: Legislative Proposals to Strengthen the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.”

Introduction

Thank you Chairwoman Landrieu, Ranking Member Snowe and members of the Committee. My name is Fonda Lindfors New. I am from Baton Rouge, Louisiana and I am the Founder and CEO of Quaternary Resource Investigations, LLC, which started in 1986. My testimony today will focus on the legislative proposals currently before the Senate, including the SUCCESS and TEAM Acts of 2012; highlighting the challenges facing small business owners, especially those who are woman owned small businesses such as QRI.

Founder of QRI’s Background

To put my testimony into perspective, I would like to give you a brief summary of my background. I have been Chairwoman Landrieu’s constituent since 1997. Like Senator Landrieu, I was born in an East Coast southern town, in my case Charleston, SC, and later moved to Louisiana. I wanted to be a geologist since I was eight years old. The love of geology was fed by both my mother and father who took our family on fossil and rock collecting trips throughout the country on every coast and many rivers. I absolutely loved it and my siblings are still talking about the sacrifices they made for my career, such as, the ability to identify all poisonous snakes, plants, spiders and other insects on a regional basis. I graduated from the College of Charleston in 1981 with a BS in Geology desiring to practice fluvial and coastal geology. I took a great job in the state of Louisiana that had the nation’s largest river and coastal zone. Upon graduation, I worked at the Louisiana Geological Survey as a Coastal Geologist from 1981 to 1986 performing the collection and analysis of borings in coastal Louisiana. These borings were utilized to collect peat samples for radiocarbon dating by the laboratory I built and operated in order to construct sea level rise curves to assist in the modeling efforts for Louisiana coastal restoration.

QRI Story: Founding & Early Years

While working in the coastal zone for LGS, I noticed thousands of oilfield production pits that needed to be remediated and closed. The entrepreneur desire overcame the comfort and security of a state job and I founded QRI. Senators, this was not the year to start a business in Louisiana since the oil industry was decimated by a 46% price drop in oil. However, I had developed a technique known as Hard-To-Access-Sampling™ and this technique allowed the oil companies to know how much material had to be removed from the production pits. Thus, the beginning of QRI was born from a love of restoring coastal Louisiana by bringing oilfield legacy sites into compliance. Over the past 27 years, QRI has grown through the hard work and dedication of a staff that now produces annual sales of over $8,000,000 and has completed over 4,560 projects. QRI provides services in six

Quaternary

Resource

Investigations, L.L.C.

US SBA 8(a) l US EDWOSB

Houston W/DBE l DFW W/DBE

LA DBE l LED

Founded in 1986

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Economy: Legislative Proposals to Strengthen the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem | Fonda Lindfors New, QRI

Divisions: ?HTRW / Environmental / Consulting founded-1986, ?Drilling founded-1987, ?Geophysical founded-2003, ?Emergency Response / Remediation founded-2004, ?Construction founded-2009, ?Information Technology founded-2012.

QRI Story: Challenges Faced

This geologist learned very quickly that my geologic education did not teach me about capital, contracting, how to administrate a business, strategic partnerships, and how state and federal laws impacted my business, thus many challenges were faced in the early years. These challenges were further complicated by my gender. Therefore, the early history of QRI can be described as existence and survival. I will say that the on the job training that QRI required vastly improved my prayer life in the early years. However, I would not recommend: “Oh God, Oh God please help me to become a better business person” as any business woman’s only plan to improve her administrative skills.

The three biggest challenges QRI has faced over the last 27 years are capital, entering the federal market and contracts. We have provided specific examples below on how QRI has overcome those challenges as a woman owned business.

QRI has discovered two facts in dealing with banks. Fact 1 ? Big banks are more difficult to deal with than small community banks. Fact 2 ? Even though I have successfully run QRI for 27 years, I must be accompanied by a male for all bank meetings. The following example is an excerpt from my 8(a) SBD Certification application: When a large bank (LB) bought out QRI’s small community bank (SCB), my banking issues began almost immediately with this large bank versus the small home town bank. My SCB loan officer and I were in the process of renewing QRI's standard Accounts Receivable and Equipment Loan when the bank acquisition occurred. I had banked at the SCB for 9 years and had an outstanding history of both growth and payment. After the acquisition, the rules changed and the standard renewal process took 98 days instead of the usual 5. When I went to the SCB loan officer to get an explanation of why everything was so different he said, “Welcome to the old world boy's club. Fonda your problem is that you are not a man but they will not tell you that.” I called a QRI Board Meeting and relayed the potential of not having the bank and/or an Accounts Receivable line and we developed an interim plan. The line and equipment loan was eventually renewed but only after extensive costly effort on my part. Dealings with the bank continued to be very difficult so I eventually had to endure the cost of hiring male representatives. Letters from these representatives were always well received and the requests immediately granted while requests from me met automatic resistance. I decided to move all our financial dealings to a smaller banking environment that would tolerate women-in-business and not discriminate as much. The negative impact of my dealings with the LB was that resources (time and money) went out the door for a 98 day period while enduring the banking take over. In addition, there was the constant stress of knowing even when I was awarded large industry contracts, the cash flow of the company would have to fund them and there would be no additional banking assistance despite years of appropriate performance with the bank. The positive impact was that I learned how to operate within the existing system to fund QRI’s growth.

The challenges below illustrate QRI’s journey to enter new market places and develop a winning strategy for Federal contracts. For 13 years, greater than 75% of QRI’s business came from providing specific niche services (closing 29 B sites) to the oil industry and primarily two companies, Chevron and Texaco. In 2000, Chevron bought Texaco and by 2004 Chevron implemented a Global Procurement program. QRI competed for the business but lost our 13 year

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Economy: Legislative Proposals to Strengthen the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem | Fonda Lindfors New, QRI

client to a large business. We developed a plan to overcome the loss of this revenue stream by applying and receiving 8(a) status. In addition to applying for Federal certifications, QRI also expanded into other commercial markets and added geophysical services. QRI was certified as a Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) into the 8(a) program on January 13, 2004 and began receiving subcontracts with large businesses in the Federal arena. On August 29, 2005, 85% of the contracts on which QRI was working were either delayed and/or cancelled due to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Because QRI had Federal certifications in place and had greatly expanded their client list, we were hired on September 5, 2005 as a subcontractor on the US EPA START (Superfund Technical Assessment & Response Team) contract for hurricane recovery. This experience eventually led to QRI receiving our first Federal competitive prime award in August of 2007. From 2007 to the present QRI has been awarded 77 prime federal contracts with the United States Army Corp of Engineers in seven districts (New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, Seattle, Fort Worth, Tulsa and Galveston), United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, United States Geological Survey, General Service Administration, National Park Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency. Concurrently with building qualifications to be a prime contractor, QRI was developing the in-house skills to respond to the many variations of government bids (IFB, SF330, RFP, RFQ) and the extensive time and resources required to strategize, write, negotiate teaming agreements and eventually win a Federal contract.

Emerging Leaders Experience

An additional way we overcame the challenges was to participate and attend every course offered by the SBA in our area. One of those courses, Emerging Leaders or E200, required 6 months of efforts and continues to benefit the growth of QRI.

I first became aware of Emerging Leaders in an email from Jo Ann Lawrence, Supervisory Business Development Specialist, SBA, New Orleans, LA. I contacted her to get additional details on the program and she assured me that the class would be very beneficial to QRI. She was correct, E200 was an excellent course. I attended the New Orleans E200 from April to October of 2011.

The curriculum was well thought out and included written resources that my upper management at QRI still uses. The instructor, Sherif Ebrahim, was an excellent teacher who pushed me to SUCCESS in this course. My first experience with the course curriculum was to complete the Business Growth Self Assessment™ (BGSA). Completion of the BGSA was the first of many wake-up calls about my ability to truly lead my company. The next step was the draft preparation of our Strategic Growth Action Plan™ (SGAP) which was revised from May to the final submission in October.

The E200 course was a great success for QRI. The SGAP was so detailed that it was instrumental in increasing our bank AR line by 32% (see attached excerpt from the SGAP). At the request of our major banker, an updated SGAP was prepared and submitted in June of 2012 to once again successfully increase our AR line by 24%.

The difference between E200 and other private sector offerings that I attended is that the course was REAL WORLD and not just classes where you learn terms to take a test and then forget. In addition you have guest speakers from Industry and Government who will answer very specific questions about leadership, financial management, sales & marketing and resource management. The E200 course allowed me to develop a valuable set of tools that are repeatedly used by our upper management.

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Economy: Legislative Proposals to Strengthen the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem | Fonda Lindfors New, QRI

Today, I maintain contact with several CEOs from the E200 New Orleans Class of 2011. In addition, Sherif Ebrahim continues to be a resource to me and my company. When I talk to other small business owners, I highly recommend this course, especially to scientific leaders such as myself that have not had this type of coursework in college. I truly believe if I would have had the benefit of a program like E200 in my early years my challenges would have still occurred but I would have achieved success more quickly.

Emerging Leaders Facts

Since 2008, Emerging Leaders has reached over 1,000 small business owners in 27 communities nationwide with 41% of the participants being women. This program is the only government program that focuses on existing small business owners in underserved and Native American communities. At QRI we are always focusing on return on investment and the cost to the Federal Government is about 1/10 of 1% of entire SBA FY11 budget for the whole program.

As a result of our participation in the 8(a) program and SBA provided seminars and courses such as Emerging Leaders, QRI’s revenue and access to capital increased by over 50% from 2010 to 2011 and staffing increased by 22%.

Other Key SBA Programs

QRI is extremely interested in changes to the EDWOSB (Economically Disadvantaged Woman Owned Small Business) program as stated in the Fairness in Women-Owned Small Business Contracting Act of 2012. In addition to removing the contract award price limits, removing the economically disadvantaged requirement and adding sole sourcing contract vehicles, QRI would like to ask the committee to consider adding a formal Mentor-Protégé program such as the 8(a) has in place.

As the Chairwoman and other Senators have stated, entrepreneurs are the backbone of our economy. Small businesses are the number one job creators and especially important in underserved communities. With just a little investment from the federal government, small business owners are given the tools to thrive and in doing so provide jobs and turn around neighborhoods. This bill is essential to many small businesses’ economic future including QRI.

Conclusion

I would like to thank the Committee on behalf of QRI and small businesses, for their attention to these important matters and their support for entrepreneurs. I would also like to thank the committee for their continued endeavors to make sure outstanding SBA employees such as Jo Ann Lawrence and E200 contractors like Sherif Ebrahim are funded and able to continue to assist companies such as QRI. I am happy to answer any questions on these issues and to serve as a resource to the Senators.

Thank you very much for allowing me the privilege to provide this testimony.

Respectfully submitted,

Fonda Lindfors New, CPG

CEO of Quaternary Resource Investigations, LLC

QRI Strategic Growth Action Plan

STRATEGIC

GROWTH

ACTION

PLAN

October 5, 2011

QUATERNARY RESOURCE INVESTIGATIONS, LLC

13588 Florida Boulevard

Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70819

Web Site: http://qri.com

Phone: 225.292.1400

Fax: 225.292.1404

FONDA LINDFORS NEW, CEO

Phone: 225.202.8438

Email: flin@qri.lcom

QRI Strategic Growth Action Plan

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY..........................................................................................1

SECTION I – COMPANY PROFILE ..........................................................................2

Location, Industry, Products & Services, Years in Business, Specialties................................................. 2

Table I – 1. QRI Service Divisions and Top Clients ...............................................................................2

Mission, Vision, Values, Value Proposition .............................................................................................. 2

Figure I – 1. QRI Office Locations..........................................................................................................2

Table I – 2. Testimonials about QRI’s Services ......................................................................................3

Certifications & Special Designations, Ratings, Licenses, Memberships ................................................ 4

Table I – 3. QRI’s Certifications & Special Designations, Ratings, Licenses, Memberships.................4

SECTION II – BUSINESS STRATEGY .....................................................................4

Current Stage of Business, Revenue $, # of Employees............................................................................ 4

Table II – 1. Summary of QRI’s current revenue, services, offices and average contract size. ..............5

Recent Actions Taken to Set the Stage for Further Growth ..................................................................... 5

Factors That Have Made QRI Successful ................................................................................................. 5

Current Business Landscape...................................................................................................................... 5

Table II- 2A. Prime Federal Contracts for Environmental Division of QRI from 2007 to Present........5

Table II- 2B. Prime Federal Contracts for Drilling Division of QRI from 2007 to Present. ..................6

Table II- 2C. Prime Federal Contracts for Geophysical Division of QRI from 2007 to Present............6

Table II- 2D. Prime Federal Contracts for Emergency Response / Remediation Division of QRI from 2007 to Present........................................................................................................................................6

Table II- 2E. Prime Federal Contracts for Construction Division of QRI from 2007 to Present. ..........7

Marketing and Business Expansion Strategies ......................................................................................... 8

Funding Growth......................................................................................................................................... 8

QRI Strategic Growth Action Plan

SECTION III – STRATEGIC GROWTH GOALS ........................................................9

Year 1 – 2012.............................................................................................................................................. 9

Table III- 1. YEAR 2012 growth goal with timeframe, action steps, measurement of success, who’s responsible and the financial implications to QRI. ..................................................................................9

Year 2 – 2013............................................................................................................................................ 10

Table III- 2. YEAR 2013 growth goal with timeframe, action steps, measurement of success, who’s responsible and the financial implications to QRI. ................................................................................10

Year 3 – 2014............................................................................................................................................ 11

Table III- 3. YEAR 2014 growth goal with timeframe, action steps, measurement of success, who’s responsible and the financial implications to QRI. ................................................................................11

SECTION IV – GOING FORWARD .........................................................................12

Opportunities............................................................................................................................................ 12

Figure IV – 1. Oil spill ribbons flowing in at Caminada Moreau Pass, LA. .........................................12

Figure IV – 2. Trends in the QRI NAICS Codes from 2005 to 2010. ...................................................12

Figure IV – 3. Coastal Restoration Strategy resulting in NRDA work because of the BP Oil Spill. ....14

Threats...................................................................................................................................................... 15

Table IV – 1. Summary of all companies in QRI’s service area with Top 2 Competitors. ...................15

Key Success Factors................................................................................................................................. 15

Table IV - 2. QRI Clients and prospects per division............................................................................16

Figure IV – 4. QRI Summary of Sales Pipeline.....................................................................................16

Table IV – 3. QRI clients per business year with comments on significant occurrences......................17

ATTACHMENTS........................................................................................................

Attachment 1. QRI Tri-fold on Services....................................................................................................

Attachment 2. QRI Statement of Qualifications ........................................................................................

Attachment 3. QRI Bank Certification for September 30, 2011................................................................

Attachment 4. QRI Financial Statements ending September 30, 2011......................................................

QRI Strategic Growth Action Plan 1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The following presents Quaternary Resource Investigation, LLC (QRI) Strategic Action Growth Plan to continue to expand the company that was founded in February of 1986 over the next three years. QRI has five divisions: ?Hazardous Toxic Radiological Waste / Environmental / Consulting founded-1986, ?Drilling founded-1987, ?Geophysical founded-1987, ?Emergency Response / Remediation founded-2004, ?Construction founded-2009. QRI provides services to large consultants, oil industry, petrochemical industry and various agencies within the federal government such as the United States Corps of Engineers, United States Coast Guard, National Park Service, United States Navy and the General Service Administration.

QRI’s company profile is detailed in SECTION I which includes QRI’s services and top clients (Table I-1), QRI’s office locations (Figure I-1), testimonials (Table I-2) and certifications (Table I-3).

SECTION II discusses the business strategy for continuing the growth of QRI in the current business landscape. Table II-1 summarizes QRI’s current revenue, services, offices and average contract size. Table II-2 summarizes the QRI federal contracts since 2007.

SECTION III represents the strategic growth goals for QRI in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The specific goal, timeframe, action steps, measurement of success, who’s responsible and the financial implication are detailed in this section. The goals are as follows:

GROWTH GOAL #1 ? $26,000,000 in sales with 8% Net Profit serving 60% Government and 40% Commercial Markets by increasing employees, acquisition of other small businesses with backlog, increasing the number of proposals submitted over the next 3 years measured by weekly, monthly, quarterly financial statements (Table III-1).

GROWTH GOAL #2 ? Harden the companies accounting structure by replacing with a Defense Contractor Audit Agency approved system over the next three years in order for the administrative team to provide an accurate weekly financial scoreboard to the sales and technical team managers (Table III-2).

GROWTH GOAL #3 ? Upgrade, formalize and document marketing processes in order to teach all Program Managers and Field Personnel on "Up Selling” and rapid communication with the Marketing Team over the next 3 years to increase the sales and client base by 43% (Table III-3).

SECTION IV details how QRI is going forward and includes a discussion on opportunities, threats, and key success factors. Despite the current economic crisis going on in the USA, there are two major challenges that the US Federal Government will have to address:

1) Integrity of the Mississippi River Levee System and

2) Protection of the Gulf of Mexico area that provides not only the infrastructure for the oil and gas industry but the habitat for the fisheries industry.

QRI has established a very strong business position in the levee integrity issues of the Mississippi Valley Division by performing 41 contracts for the USACE with over 25% of those projects involving protection of the levee system. All of QRI’s performance ratings on these projects were OUTSTANDING. As Figure IV-3 shows, QRI was recently awarded the contract to assist the United States Coast Guard on the Biological Assessment of the Deepwater Horizon event. The findings of the Biological Assessment will be provided to numerous federal agencies and will be utilized in the coastal restoration challenges in the Gulf of Mexico; thus, putting QRI in the forefront of abundant federal opportunities. Figure IV-1 shows oil spill ribbons flowing in at Caminada Moreau Pass, LA as a result of the BP oil spill. The qualifications earned over the next 2 to 3 years performing this work will position QRI for additional contracts involving Gulf of Mexico coastal restoration. Figure IV-2 depicts the trends in the QRI NAICS Codes from 2005 to 2010 and Figure IV-3 is the Coastal Restoration Strategy to capture Natural Resource Damage Assessment due to the BP Oil Spill. Table IV-1 summarizes the competitors in QRI’s service area including the Top 2 Competitors. Table IV-2 represents QRI Clients and prospects per division. Figure IV-4 shows a summary of QRI’s Sales Pipeline with Table IV – 3 discussing QRI clients per business year with comments on significant occurrences.