Top Private Companies

Every year, Albuquerque Business First looks at the state’s highest-performing companies through the Top Private Companies List, portraying a wide array of New Mexico’s most prominent businesses.

Rankings for the List are based on survey responses from companies across a variety of sectors in the state, from construction, architecture and engineering, to retail, the arts, marketing and advertising, to information technology, accounting and legal services — and lots in between.

This year, Business First again decided to highlight a singular business on the List. The selection was not based on a nomination or ranking criteria, but rather on a success story worth sharing. A good idea, born from shared drinks between friends that would become a multimillion-dollar business headquartered in Albuquerque.

After celebrating its 10th anniversary in April, Verus Research continues to forge ahead, building on its strong foundation.

The advanced technology firm grew from a handful of employees in its early startup days to more than 140 employees across four Albuquerque locations. According to data from the Top Private Companies List, Verus Research grew 89.13% comparing its 2020 revenue to its 2023 revenue.

In the following article, Business First explores Verus Research's success and future plans.

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A decade into its journey, advanced technology firm Verus Research has gone from a handful of employees in its early startup days to more than 140 employees spread across four Albuquerque locations.

And with large federal contracts continuing to roll in, its leaders believe the company is just getting started.

"I think we're going to be a $100 million business with over 200 employees in five or so years," Henry "Hank" Andrews, founding member and CFO of Verus Research, said. "We're having a really good year this year. Thank you very much to all of our customers and to the people who make that possible. But the growth path easily, easily gets to that mark, and in a pretty short period of time."

The concept that would eventually become Verus Research was born, like a lot of good ideas, over shared drinks between friends in late 2013.

“We never scrimped on the investment, if you will, of what did it take to do business in aerospace and defense principally for the government," Andrews said.

With the foundation established by Andrews and fellow co-founder Wheaton "Tony" Byers Jr., the firm quickly started to focus on how to attract the best talent for the job.

Out of the 142 total employees today, over 30 hold doctorate degrees.

“We're looking for very serious practitioners, experienced. In some cases, known in their field," Andrews said. "We have a number of people here who are the national expert. … I think that says a lot about the environment that this company's founders and its subsequent leaders have created for those people."

Verus Research is currently in the process of combining its Albuquerque locations into its Uptown office at 6100 Uptown Blvd. NE, where Verus occupies the second and seventh floors and plans to build out the third floor. The second floor of the office building is where the company started in 2014.

Ranked No. 24 on Albuquerque Business First's 2024 Top Private Companies List, Business First recently sat down with Andrews for the inside story on Verus' success, doing business in the Duke City and competitive hiring.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Albuquerque Business First: It would be great to hear a little bit about the company's founding from your perspective as one of the founding members.

Hank Andrews: Very late in 2013, two of our founders, me and our first CEO, had reached interesting forks in our career roads. We met for drinks, talked and said, 'We can do this.' The deal was he would find the revenue and I would make the business platform on which it all landed. That was December of 2013, by April 2014, we had formed the company with the State of New Mexico. … We have 35 contracts that we are working on.

Multiple customers, most of them prime contracts of the government, a wide array of technical disciplines inside the company who are enabling that work. Thirty-one of those people have Ph.D.s. About 65% of them we recruit from New Mexico. The nice thing about the fact that there's 35% that come from out of state is, we like to tell people that people want to come to New Mexico, you just have to show them.

How would you compare the early days of the business, running it with only a handful of people, to where the company is right now?

It was definitely more challenging at the beginning, because there was so much work to do to run the whole business, but not a lot of people to do it. But one of the things we always committed to ourselves to do was to make sure that we sort of paid the price of admission, to be from the outside looking in, to be a sophisticated, well-formed, well-managed business in control. … We could’ve started with QuickBooks, but we didn't. We started with this very sophisticated enterprise resource planning system because we felt it would allow us to give comfort to our customers and to the government.

What do you think makes Albuquerque the best headquarters for Verus Research?

I've been here over 20 years. I consider myself a quasi-native now. The founders, we were working here when we founded the company. Albuquerque, New Mexico, more generally, it's a fantastic environment for technological advancement. The national laboratories, the Air Force Research Laboratory directorates on Kirtland, the other large tech companies that are here in this town, it's like a gravitational pull of talent. Now eventually, some of that talent is going to want to move. The bigger the ecosystem of technological talent is, the more all of the people operating in that ecosystem benefit. Do we lose people to other ones? Sure, but we're just as good at recruiting back from them as well.

When the talent is here, when somebody's ready to move, we generally have a space for them to go. … I don't think it's ever been difficult for us to do business in New Mexico or Albuquerque, but it's always a knife fight for talent. Let's be honest about that. It's because your competitor wants that same person, and the real question is: Who's got the better deal? One of the things we try to do is make ourselves the employer of choice in the eyes of somebody who's applying to us.

How does incentivizing collaborative work in the physical sciences impact the workplace here?

It's fascinating when you walk around this floor and you saw examples of intentionally designed collaboration spaces. Our newer sites all have that. … It's interesting to watch how often people will take advantage of that space, especially in the vicinity of the labs. At Hotel Circle, that site is 41,000 square feet; 30,000 of it is lab space. So, we try to make sure that there's a place for people to gather around a whiteboard, or a big computer monitor and just brainstorm. … We're very much about hard-wall offices. Not because we don't want to be together, but because all of those big brains, they really do sometimes need to close the door and think.

What do you attribute Verus Research's various research successes to?

A couple come to mind. One is we talked about the fact that we were willing to present ourselves as a fully formed business in control as early in our history as possible. Another thing is we have given great latitude to our teammates in terms of what technical areas do they want to explore. And then, I guess the third part is we've tried very hard to make sure that we provide them the resources they need to succeed, and then get out of the way.

Original founders of Verus Research/XL Scientific LLC: