ABOUTIn the thick of the work as an operator, never on the sideline as a consultant.
Cate Dussek is the founder of Liminal Strategy Group. She has led federal contractors through every inflection point the firm now serves: being acquired and acquiring others, building combined teams and new culture from two sets of people who did not yet know each other; the night a single contract doubled the size of the company, then the year it took to build the corporate infrastructure, performance management system, and strategic roadmap that made the larger company actually real; the small-to-other-than-small cliff — sometimes by helping a firm sell to avoid it, sometimes by rethinking the operating model to live on the other side; and the one- and three-year strategy roadmaps that build enterprise value when a transaction is twelve to thirty-six months out.
Twenty-plus years inside GovCon. The bulk of those years — at PQA, SRA, CSRA, and GDIT — growing larger contracts and acquisition teams that win and execute them, ending with a four-hundred-person team for portfolios in excess of nine billion dollars. Bookending those years, concurrent senior line responsibility for the back of the house and program delivery: early career at PQA, VP of Operations at Herndon Solutions Group, and most recently EVP and Chief Administrative Officer at CATHEXIS, LLC — with concurrent and distinct direct responsibility for finance, contracts, HR and recruiting, IT, security, quality, program delivery, and facilities. Track record includes M&A integrations scaling a portfolio from one hundred to thirty-five thousand professionals.
Throughout, Cate has helped leaders adjust, teams function better, and culture thrive — through coaching and the intentional integration of behavioral and technical skill-gap assessment. She has a passion for helping people thrive and making sense of the complex world of government contracting. Cate is a Certified Leadership & Performance Coach with applied neuroscience training and holds a BBA in International Business, with a Concentration in Finance from James Madison University (JMU).
THE LIMINAL IDEAWhat we mean when we say liminal.
A liminal space is the threshold between what was and what's next. Anthropologists use the word for the middle stage of a rite of passage — the disorienting interval after a person has left their old role but before they've taken on the new one. It is uncomfortable on purpose. The discomfort is necessary for lasting change.
In business, leaders find themselves in liminal spaces throughout their careers and are often stuck not knowing how to adjust to a new reality. Understanding that change has to happen, but not knowing what to change or how to make the change is daunting.
Most consultants treat that moment as a problem to be diagnosed and a deck to be delivered. Most fractional executives treat it as a calendar to be filled. Liminal treats it as the work itself — the actual job, not the prelude to the job. We sit inside the threshold with the leader and build the operating capacity that lets them confidently walk through it.