On this month’s episode of The Business of Defense Rich Brady speaks to Reza Mahbod, President of RMA Associates about why takes more than grit and determination to sustain business for the long haul.

During a discussion for the Society of Defense Financial Management’s The Business of Defense podcast on Federal News Network, Mahbod shared the backstory of his own entrepreneurial evolution. Interestingly, there are a lot of congruencies with the Marine Corps recently becoming the first Defense Department organization to achieve a clean audit.

“You can get there with, I would say, brute force just by getting comfortable with the numbers, doing a lot of substantive testing, providing the information to get to the beginning balances,” Mahbod said. “But to sustain that and maintain it year over year, the processes need to be in place and the controls need to be in place. That is a much harder thing to accomplish. It just it takes time. Internal controls have to be designed and implemented, then they have to be tested.”

Continue reading for more on the conversation and/or to watch the video podcast.