VSA Construction Services LLC has been in business only a few months, but its employees are building their business on a reputation that they have gained over the past several years.

The 19-member team was once the construction arm of Horne Engineering Services Inc. But when founder Darryl Horne scaled back his company's construction services in February, Richard Vance, who led the construction team for eight years, decided to start his own company.

He called in old Air Force buddy Robert Sharps, Horne employees and others to create VSA.

The partners raised $850,000 and obtained a $1.4 million portion of a $3.5 million federal contract in Wilmington, Del., before holding an open house at their new office in Annapolis Junction last week. All of the construction staffers at Horne joined the new company.

The crew is working on 12 other bids, and it's projected that the company will generate $10 million in revenue in its first year.

Should business go as expected, the partners say they also hope to increase their staff to 48 employees within a year.

"We had such a great team and I had spent a lot of time putting them together," said Vance, VSA's president. "We know what their capabilities are and what they can do and can't do. We're very comfortable working with them as a team."

Doug Allston, president of Advantage Consulting Inc. in Annandale, Va., says VSA is in a good position for expansion because it was able to transfer an intact team.

"These guys are coming in the business with good access already. If they play that card correctly, and make themselves available, they should be successful," Allston said. "Very few companies get hired by the government. What gets hired is Doug and Jim and Jill and Margaret and their people who happen to work for fill-in-the-blank."

Keith Bickell, managing director of the Bickell Group, a market research company in McLean, Va., says VSA is in the right market because a lot federal dollars are spent on construction and a large number of federal contracts are based in the Baltimore-Washington area.

But he warned that a company relying heavily on federal spending would be wise to diversify, and that a new staff would need to be hired to handle that shift.

"If you're a total federal contractor, it is smarter to diversify because the margins are higher. Then you're not dependent on something redirecting spending against you," he said. "The problem is, it's a different mentality in how you make the sale. If they want to diversify, they should not anticipate that the sales and marketing tactics are the same. It's critical to have different staff as you move into a new marketplace."

That is exactly what the company is trying to do. Sharps, the newcomer to the staff, is chairman of Howard County's zoning Board of Appeals and was also Vance's commander when the two served in the Air Force doing similar work. He said his job is to look for opportunities in private industry.

"We're trying to align ourselves with companies that complement our services," Sharps said. "As we grow, we're going to look at the segments of the industry we want to be in. What I'm doing is deciding where we can best fit in the private sector."

VSA - Vance, Sharps and Associates - focuses on environmental, utility and civil construction, which is all work in the ground. Instead of constructing palatial homes or tall buildings, it prepares the land for roadways and power lines, sinks underground storage tanks, caps landfills and builds and restores berms and stream banks.

The company has worked throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, but it has not worked in Howard County.

Although the management team has worked up to 20 projects at once, Vance and Sharps, both disabled veterans, say they prefer to keep their business small - to continue to take advantage of Small Business Administration set-asides for disabled veterans and to keep a better handle on management.

But their focus now is to build a reputation under a new name.

"This company has the components most people dream of and we're going to build on that," Sharps said. "We've earned the respect as a people to go forward."