New at the top: Michael Fraser is chief executive officer at National Technologies Associates

I was going to college at Long Beach State when both my parents got laid off and there was no longer any money for school. I joined the Air Force so it would pay for my education. I grew up in California, and wouldn’t you know it, the Air Force decides rather than send me to see the world, it would send me to Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is in Santa Barbara.

I had not planned on staying for 20 years. My thought was let me go to school, get them to pay for it and get out. Then they agreed to pay for my graduate degree.

I spent some of my service with the National Reconnaissance Office. At the time, Trident Data Systems was an IT support contractor. So I knew the company. They were building an East Coast office, and they needed somebody to go out and run the East Coast operations for them. I packed my bags and moved to Manassas.

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About that time, the dot-com business was starting to grow, and companies needed somebody to develop and manage a secure database for them. So my friends – we had worked together at Trident Data Systems – we said maybe there’s a business in all this. We started iMask, doing secure database-management development for a lot of companies, most of them dot-com companies. I ran the business on the finance side, and they did the technical work. That worked really great until the dot-com companies started to not pay their bills. We went up really fast, and we came down really fast.

Right around 9/11, a couple of good friends of mine at Veridian called to say they had been approached by the Defense Department about network security and infrastructure protection. So I stepped into Veridian and ran one of their infrastructure-protection businesses.

After Veridian was bought by General Dynamics, I was eventually asked to run the company’s surveillance and reconnaissance business, which was more of a technical role, something I wanted to get into.

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I learned a lot at GD, but at some point, it hit me I’m just not cut out to work at a $20-billion-plus company. I got a call from a headhunter about an opportunity in London and took a job there.

After a while, I moved on. A buddy of mine is a chief executive at Artel. We had worked together at General Dynamics. He needed somebody to run merger-and-acquisition strategy and business development. We were having fun building the company, and then I got a call from another headhunter about an opportunity for a CEO. That is an opportunity you can’t pass up. That’s how I ended up here. It’s a perfect fit. It’s in the right sector. It’s an opportunity to really grow and transform the company.

— Interview with Kathy Orton

Michael Fraser

Position: Chief executive officer, National Technologies Associates, a Shirlington, Va., company that provides technical support services to government customers

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Career highlights: Senior vice president, Artel; executive vice president, iDirect Government Technologies; division president, Altegrity; vice president and general manager, General Dynamics AIS; sector president, Veridian

Education: BA, business management, University of La Verne, Calif.; MS, systems management, University of Southern California

Personal: Lives in Leesburg with wife Carla. Has an adult son and daughter.

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