Sierra Nevada Corporation

Sierra Nevada Corporation was founded in 1963 in an airplane hangar at the Reno Stead Airport, where its first employees worked on aircraft and avionics for the small but already serious Nevada aerospace cluster of that decade. In 1994, two engineers who had been at the firm for thirteen and one years respectively — Fatih and Eren Özmen — acquired it through a management buyout financed by mortgaging their personal residence. Three decades later, SNC is the privately held aerospace-and-defence company they built out of that purchase, with around four thousand employees and thirty-six sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey, and is one of the largest woman-owned defence contractors in the world.

The firm designs and manufactures advanced engineering systems for three principal sectors — Space Systems, Commercial Solutions, and National Security and Defence — with applications in space exploration and satellites, aircraft integration, navigation and guidance systems, threat detection and physical security, scientific research instruments, and infrastructure protection. The corporation works under direct contract with the United States Department of Defence, NASA, and an extensive list of allied-government and commercial customers.

What distinguishes Sierra Nevada Corporation in its sector is the combination of private ownership, founder continuity, and operational range. Most US prime aerospace contractors of comparable scale are publicly listed; SNC has remained closely held by the Özmens for over thirty years, which gives the firm a longer planning horizon than its quarterly-reporting peers and a culture that visibly reflects two engineers running a company they bought. The firm has participated in over five hundred successful space missions, including fourteen missions to Mars.

The practice has worked with Sierra Nevada Corporation at the Sparks-Reno headquarters on Lean process implementation across operations.