When Bill Grant took over Boeing's Special Operations Forces Aerospace Support Center in 1997, he faced a challenge. Its customer base -- the Air Force -- was unhappy, employees were discouraged and the business outlook was fairly bleak. Boeing's Fort Walton Beach center supports the Air Force C-130 fleet at nearby Hurlburt Field.

Grant had retired seven years before as a colonel whose nearly 25 years of service in the Air Force had included a tour at the National Security Council with Colin Powell and a stint as vice commander at Eglin Air Force Base. He joined Rockwell, managing a company site in Australia, and when Boeing bought Rockwell's defense business in 1996, Grant stayed on.

LESSONS: With his operation now running smoothly, Bill Grant is conducting disaster preparedness workshops, sharing plans that helped his center recover quickly after Hurricane Ivan last year.Once at the center, Grant says, "It was fairly simple to see that we needed better structure, better processes and tools and a better business model than existed.'' He decided to adopt the Sterling model, which helps businesses identify their strengths and opportunities.

Grant worked on identifying "gaps" in the center's operations, installed new tools and employed new ways of doing business. "We spent nine months working those gaps off," he says.

Results -- and recognition -- came quickly. In 1998, the center successfully bid for a $1.2-billion, 10-year Air Force contract that has since grown to $3 billion. The center's once-$60 million in annual business has zoomed to $300 million, with employment growing nearly sevenfold to 739.

Grant, 62, has been careful to include local subcontractors along the way, with annual local subcontracts totaling $60 million this year. "It seems to me it makes sense, instead of buying hardware from someone in California or Kansas or wherever, let's look first to the local area," he says.

Crestview Aerospace is among the area firms that has benefited. Since 1998, the subcontractor has added 350 employees to support Boeing projects, says President Chuck Shanklin. Its Boeing Fort Walton contracts have grown tenfold, to $30 million, in the past five years.

Boeing contracts also have helped Fort Walton Machining triple in size in 10 years, to 90 employees.

In 2003, the center won a Florida Sterling Award for performance excellence and shared recognition when a Boeing parent division won a national Malcolm Baldrige award in 2004. Gov. Jeb Bush recently presented the center with a 2005 Business Diversification award for job creation.

The Florida Sterling Council -- a non-profit public/private venture designed to promote excellence -- was so impressed with Grant that it invited him to join its board. "He had such a great testimonial as to how he used that system," says Sterling Chairman John Pieno. Last month, Grant became the council's 2005-06 president.