Linda Rix founded Avue Technologies Corp. at 25 – an age when most people are just learning the ropes of their first job. She’s since grown the Tacoma company to 80 employees with offices downtown; and in Washington, D.C.; Victoria, B.C.; and – most recently – Bremerton.

Rix, 50, spends most of her workweek in D.C., getting face time with her clients – federal government agencies.

The News Tribune caught up with Rix last week to learn more about her company, how its customers use Avue’s technology and the challenges of focusing on government contracts.

What does Avue Technologies do?

We’re basically a technology company. What we do is provide a technology platform that helps our clients, which are all federal government agencies, manage their work force more effectively. It includes classic human resource stuff like recruiting and performance management. Then we also provide a lot of support for things like financial projection on payroll costs and, looking to the future, what the needs are going to be and how you are going to meet them.

Is it software or a Web site?

Everything is accessible to our customers on the Internet. Anywhere our clients are in the world – anywhere they can get to the Internet – they can get to their Avue account.

What’s an example of how your technology works?

Let’s say you are a manager and you have a job you want to fill. You can log into Avue and we’ll help you define the job, and then we’ll write the job description, write the job posting and then we electronically post it.

Our customers are government agencies and we have up to 1,500 sites that we post jobs to. Once postings go out, we collect applications online and we apply the right government regulations about who gets to be considered. Then the manager logs into that list and makes selections. It’s a very cool system if I do say so myself.

How did Avue start?

I actually went to school at University of Puget Sound. I was paying my own way through school and needed to work. I ended up getting a job with the Civil Service Commission, which is now the Office of Personal Management. I worked with them for five years. After I left, I did a short stint managing a small winery that has since disappeared. Then I decided to start consulting back to the government and that was in 1983.

So we started as a consulting company. Then in 1995, we made the decision to move into software.

Why do you focus on the federal government for clients?

Basically because of my federal government experience and that’s kind of what I knew. It takes a lot of fairly deep expertise to understand all the rules and regulations. So when we started building the technology platform, we made sure that it would be easy to deploy to the federal government. We haven’t branched out, although we’d like to. We think our next target market will be federal government contractors.

What are some of the challenges of having government customers?

The sales cycle is very long. A lot of private companies that want to sell to the government don’t have enough patience for it. You can be in a sales cycle for a year and private companies are used to weeks.

The other part is that the contracting and purchasing process is heavily regulated. There’s a massive set of regulations that dictate how the government considers products and services and that usually means there’s a type of competitive bidding process and things like that. So you have to invest a considerable amount in trying to get the business.

You have a lot of people who can say no and not very many who can say yes. So you have to have everybody in motion on the same cause at the same time.

A typical technology company would have a host of sales people. Does Avue rely on a sales force to get business?

In order to be effective marketing to government, you really need people who are experts in the field that they are marketing, so in our case, that’s HR.

The business development side of Avue is pretty high level. There’s a position in government agencies called a chief human capital officer and that’s the person who is going to make the decision. They are at the same level as chief information officer or chief financial officer. So you have to bring in people who are reasonably high up in your organization.

How important is it if for you to pay attention to Washington, D.C., politics?

I do it mostly for sport. But it is important – if you are going to do business with government, then you have to have good relations with members of Congress and members of the executive branch.

So much of your work is in D.C. Why are your headquarters in Tacoma?

I moved here as a kid and grew up here. My dad deployed to Vietnam from Fort Lewis and when he came back he wanted to retire in Tacoma. I went to school here and college here and started the company here.

By the time it got to a national company and a big D.C. presence – which has been in the last eight years – we were already really well-established here.

In terms of recruiting, we get some really fabulous people from the University of Washington campus here in computer science and engineering. That campus has made a huge difference in the labor market.

Kelly Kearsley: 253-597-8573

Linda Rix

Company: Avue Technologies Corp.

Location: Downtown Tacoma

Title: Co-chief executive officer

Employees: 80

Founded: 1983

Age: 50

Home: Lakewood

Web site: www.avuetech.com