The first business Hillary Boyce ever started was born on her couch, late at night, with a glass of wine in her hand and no plan whatsoever.
The National Defense Authorization Act had just added women-owned set-aside funding for federal contracting. Boyce had been working the government contracting world for years as an employee. She knew proposals and program management inside out. She figured she could probably do it herself.
“One night, after a couple glasses of wine, I went online and registered a company with no business plan,” she says. “No investor, no plan to kind of do. Not that I would advise that for people. Have a plan. But that’s how I did my first company.”
Within 30 days, she won her first government contract. It was small. But the lesson was immediate: even one or two employees on payroll changes everything.
“I learned quickly about the cost of money,” she says. “Cash flow importance. As an employee, you don’t see it, you don’t feel it. That’s not a nightmare to you. But as an owner, that is upfront and now it’s an issue.”
She didn’t pay herself for the entire first year. Every margin from every contract went back into payroll, workers’ comp, liability insurance. To cover her personal bills, she drove Uber on evenings and weekends.
“I just needed to maintain,” she says, “because I had faith that it would work out. And it did.”
Maintaining was relative. By the end of year two, Boyce had 85 employees, all billable. She looks back on that number now and calls it slow. It was not slow.
“I should have probably learned to slow my heels a little bit more,” she says. “’Cause that’s not as slow as it should have been to build everything.”
Her mother lent her $20,000 one month when she was short on payroll. The 20% fees on short-term debt taught her another lesson she didn’t need to learn twice.
But to understand how a first-generation business owner wound up building and selling a government contracting firm with 85 employees, you have to go back to a high school in Alexander County, North Carolina.
Taylorsville is a small town about an hour north of Charlotte. One high school in the whole county. Not much industry. Boyce joined the Navy ROTC program there because it was something to do, an extracurricular activity. The officers noticed her.
“I quickly became an ROTC officer,” she says. “That kind of sparked my interest. I realized the military was a quick way to get out of that small little town.”
Before her senior year, she signed up for the Army National Guard. She went to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, then AIT at Gulfport, Mississippi, where she learned she was a carpentry and masonry engineer.
“I didn’t really know what I was signing up for, to tell you the truth,” she says. “I didn’t know the breadth and depth of choices of MOS specialties. I was looking to do something. I was kind of a recruiter’s dream. I signed whatever.”
She came back and finished high school while drilling with her Guard unit. Her mother’s plan was college. Boyce had a different one.
“I converted from National Guard to active duty right after high school was over,” she says.
Active duty put her at Fort Benning with the 3rd Infantry Division. As a female carpentry engineer in an infantry division, there wasn’t much of a slot for her. She ended up in the brigade headquarters making placards and supervising detail work. Then her MOS was eliminated, and she had to pick a new one.
The command sergeant major and the brigade commander she’d grown close to made their preference clear: they wanted her in the command group. She reclassed to 75 Bravo, personnel pay, and stayed.
That command group is where Boyce’s education in leadership started. As an E-4 working directly for the brigade’s senior leadership, she watched colonels and command sergeants major up close, not on a podium. One of her first mentors was a colonel who later became the Army’s Chief of Public Affairs.
“I learned grit,” she says. “Never stop. Everybody has a different leadership style. You learn you have to ebb and flow to those personalities and those styles.”
She still laughs about his approach to counseling junior officers. When someone wanted a meeting, he’d tell Boyce to book them for a ten-mile run with him the next morning. That was the meeting.
From Fort Benning, she PCS’d to Hanau, Germany, with her toddler son. She was assigned to an aviation unit and eventually separated from active duty there. About four years of service total.
But she didn’t leave the work behind. The local transition office in Germany was hiring clerks to process separation orders and DD-214s. Boyce took the job. It was her first taste of government contracting, and her curiosity was immediate.
“My brain didn’t just stop with the support,” she says. “I’m asking my supervisor, well, how did y’all bid this contract? How do the costs work from the bidding part? That’s how I kind of started asking questions.”
In the years that followed, she worked government contracts across several agencies, including roles supporting wounded soldiers and military families through the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs operations and the Physical Disability Agency. Those questions about how contracts get bid never stopped. By the time she registered that company on her couch, she already knew the execution side of government contracting. The gaps in her knowledge were on the other side: financials and the cost of money.
The first company wasn’t supposed to be sold. Boyce wasn’t looking for buyers. But two years in, three separate acquisition offers landed in the same month, then collided in the same week.
“I wasn’t even selling it,” she says. “These weren’t strangers. People in my network were poking on my shoulder saying, let’s talk, let’s look at your numbers.”
A mentor told her to take it. She was young. Her energy wasn’t going to fade. She could always do something else down the road. The buyer was an IT company looking to diversify its portfolio beyond technology services. Boyce stayed on for two and a half years to manage the book of business.
During that time, the phone kept ringing. Friends who were business owners wanted help with proposals. Could she review this bid? Could she walk them through the pricing? She was already mentoring founders through her board work with Women in Defense and AFCEA’s Hampton Roads chapter.
“I was mentoring so many companies,” she says. “I’m like, maybe this should be a business, helping other small businesses grow.”
BAFO Services was supposed to be a part-time consultancy. Just Boyce, working when she wanted, learning how to sleep for once. That is not what happened.
BAFO stands for Best and Final Offer, the government acquisition term for the last round of a competitive proposal. The company helps contractors find federal opportunities and submit compliant proposals. Boyce’s team handles both sides of the work: business development strategy and the full proposal lifecycle.
“Some clients are brand new. Some are 15 years old and just need some help,” she says. “Some we help with their full pipeline, their full business development, what to go after. Some just need help with the proposal submissions.”
The model is hourly, on-demand support. Other entrepreneurs have asked Boyce how she keeps her workforce whole when all her agreements are hourly. She hasn’t had a problem with it.
“The proposals come every day,” she says.
Today BAFO has more than 50 team members and more than 150 clients. The staff is a hundred percent remote, which is not an accident. Boyce is a military spouse. Her husband has been an active-duty Naval officer for 28 years. When he deploys, she’s at every port, laptop in hand, taking meetings while he sleeps.
“I want my staff to have that flexibility too,” she says. “Go take time off during the day to volunteer at your kids’ class. When you get back, catch up on your work.”
She means it. When an employee told her he needed a day off to sit with his sick mother at the hospital, she told him to bring his laptop and go every day.
“Life is life,” she says. “We all have someone getting sick, getting older, that needs a break.”
The Army-Navy rivalry, meanwhile, plays out at the domestic level. Boyce procures the Army-Navy football tickets every year and makes sure they’re on the Army side. She dresses him in Navy, dresses herself in Army.
“His lanyard, his key chain, I make it be a Go Army,” she says. “He drives it, he takes that to work, and I see sometimes his friends be like, what the heck is that?”
The awards have been stacking up for years and show no sign of stopping. In 2025, Boyce was named Virginia Small Business Veteran of the Year by the Virginia SBDC Network and received the Veteran and Military Spouse Owned Small Business of the Year from the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce. In 2026, Women We Admire named her one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Virginia, and CoVaBIZ Magazine included her among its 175 Most Influential People. She credits the recognition to her community involvement: board service, mentoring founders, coaching transitioning special operators through the Honor Foundation, and yearly mission trips to Kenya.
“I feel like a leader’s not a leader if they’re not mentoring and giving back,” she says. “For me, it’s my medicine. It’s what we do it for.”
Her advice to founders is the same thing she tells the operators she coaches through their transitions. Make a plan, absolutely. But hold it loosely.
“Write it in pencil,” she says. “Don’t always write it in permanent marker because you never know who you’re gonna meet in the elevator the next hour, tomorrow. You never know what opportunity’s gonna come.”
At home in Norfolk, she has three grandchildren ranging from six weeks to five years old and a 12-pound toy Australian Shepherd she describes as a bundle of crazy that never calms down and never sleeps.
The dog, she says, fits right in.
Hillary Boyce is the Founder and CEO of BAFO Services, LLC, based in Norfolk, Virginia. A U.S. Army veteran, Boyce served in the Army National Guard and on active duty with the 3rd Infantry Division before spending years supporting wounded soldiers and military families through the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs operations. She is also a military spouse, supporting her husband, an active-duty Naval officer of 28 years. BAFO Services helps government contractors win federal business through business development strategy, capture support, and proposal management, serving more than 150 clients. Boyce serves on the boards of AFCEA Hampton Roads and Women in Defense, sits on the AFCEA International Small Business Committee, and is a business coach for the Honor Foundation.