Executive Profile: Richard Valentine, Akima VP for Business Development

Richard Valentine joined Akima in November 2019, serving as the vice president for business development. In the said role, Valentine leads business development growth across the federal marketplace for small business and 8A opportunities and manages partnerships with big FSIs. Throughout his 30-year career, Valentine has amassed expertise in program management, large scale systems integration, application development, deployment of new technologies, strategic planning and cloud services, his LinkedIn profile stated. The executive joined Akima after nearly two years of tenure at IBM Federal, serving as director of sales and capture, homeland security, justice and foreign affairs, as well as director of sales and capture. During his time at IBM Federal, Valentine supported the build-up of pipeline opportunities and collaborated with account teams to devise plans to enable IBM to meet client mission needs. Valentine also helped large multi-functional cross-band teams in planning and conducting negotiations with all levels of customer and product management to close complex opportunities worth $30M to $1B. As a 19-year service area leader for IBM, he demonstrated service line management leadership for over 200 skilled resources in support of client engagements. Earlier in his career, he worked for Union Labor Life Insurance as director for operations and technical support. He earned his master of business administration from the University of Maryland University College.