Deborah Gross

Deborah Gross
President and Owner – Dayton Defense

Deborah is President/Owner of DGrossConsulting, LLC, a consulting business headquartered in Beavercreek, OH.  Deborah is a lifelong Daytonian and works from her office in Beavercreek, helping defense companies work through the complex process of working in the Defense sector.   Her areas of expertise are:   Strategic Plans & Pipeline, Full Life Cycle of Business Development and Capture Processes, Proposal Writing/Review, and Marketing and Networking.  She has a seminar series on “Doing Business with the Government” that started in the summer of 2010.  The seminar is designed to help companies do business with the Government with a focus on WPAFB.  It includes six sessions:  Know Your Customer, The Strategic Plan and the Pipeline, Business Development and Capture, The Proposal – How to Write A Winning One, You Won! Now What!, and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR).  It is her intention to help foster more business in Ohio though awareness.

Deborah is an experienced senior business development professional and operations manager, with business and personal strengths including strong leadership, decision-making, relationship building, and business skills.  Deborah has over 25 years of experience as leader in government contracting predominately managing large IT solutions.  She has more than ten years of experience building organizations and working important issues in the Defense sector.

In her role as Executive Director of the DaytonDefense organization (www.daytondefense.org) she has led the organization to unprecedented growth and expansion of member services.  Under Deborah’s leadership, as President, DaytonDefense expanded to more than 310 member organizations with more than 10,000 regional employees representing a huge economic footprint in the region.    She has implemented numerous successful initiatives that have been embraced by the Air Force as well as the contractor community.   Prior to her role as Executive Director she was the President, Vice President, Events Committee Chair and Nomination committee.

Deborah is currently working on numerous new programs for the Defense community.  One of those is the recently announced “Wright Center for Workforce Development”.   This newly awarded Grant will be applied to address a unique problem confronted by the region’s Defense contractors – that of a surge in jobs associated with the Base Re-Alignment and Closure (BRAC) and the shrinking of the defense sector workforce in general due to projected high retirement rates over the next 10 years.

Deborah is featured in the Discover the Dayton Region (2008 edition), as a Dayton Region Community Leader.   In December 2008 Deborah was awarded one of the Ten Top Women of the Dayton Region award in a ceremony at the Schuster Center in downtown Dayton.  Ms. Gross also won the Cannon Business Woman of the Year Award 2004, a national award for women in the IT industry.  She was also one of six national winners of the Office Depot Business Woman of the Year awards in 2005.

Deborah resides in Beavercreek with her husband Paul and has three grown children and six grandchildren that all call the Dayton area home.