Turning a compliance backlog for a 4-person team into a fully managed grant portfolio that quadrupled their awards in a single quarter.

The situation

A small (4-person) team had been working on a single DOE grant that funded the majority of company spend for ~2 years when they were fortunate enough to have four new grants awarded in a single quarter. They reached out to Ibex for help managing the new awards, both in terms of financial and reporting compliance, but also strategic advice and tactical project management as they hired new team members to fulfill the objectives of the new awards.

What we did

The Ibex team focused on the accounting first, because it became clear on an initial review that the current accounting team was in over their heads:

• The existing award was not only behind schedule on spend, with invoicing lagging a quarter behind actual spend, but the existing award had also been invoiced improperly leading to under-reimbursement from expenditures.

Once the billing and accounting infrastructure issues were remediated and a plan was put in place to complete the existing grant with a short no-cost extension, the Ibex team:

• Worked on a comprehensive forecast that blended the requirements of all the new awards with the resources available for the team. The new forecast allowed management to see what specifically they needed to hire for and when to maximize output and success on their awards with the least amount of overhead / resources.
• Built a portfolio-management style dashboard on grant expenditures that was reviewed monthly by the executive team to track budgets vs actuals.

The result

By taking the complex grant requirements of what could be spent on which award, and transforming it all into an executive dashboard (aka "pretty pictures") the Ibex team was able to identify issues and pivot performance plans when projects began to veer off track (vs doing a no-cost extension at the end of the period of performance and incurring more costs than required). Every month the questions became more strategic, from: "Do you have enough labor for all these grants" to "Are these grants enough to keep the lights on" to "why so many contractors instead of employees, a single hire costs less and gives you more indirect rates than multiple contractors, if you can keep that employee at 60%+ allocation." Given the growth in the organization and an accurate forecast the Ibex team was also able to support new proposals with more accurate indirect rates, allowing the organization to scale and removing the executives from the day-to-day operations of award management.