“Providing Technology Services, Training and Readiness Solutions”

Louisa Long Jaffe, CEO & President of TAPE enjoyed great experiences and military leadership training in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and U.S. Army Reserve. After 28 years, she separated as a Lieutenant Colonel. She believes that the Army is exemplary in empowering leaders to take actions and think with self-reliance. “I worked hard to envision and create a ‘culture of success’ internally at TAPE and externally in our branding and customer, employee, and teammate relations,” adds Louisa. “I continually explore new, imaginative ways to communicate with all stakeholders. My highest priority is to develop personal relationships with customers while keeping strong connections to our employees who support them.”

"TAPE is our baby. We created it together."

TAPE was born in 2003 about 6 weeks after Louisa married co-founder, Bill Jaffe, in a Las Vegas chapel with “Elvis” singing. Before meeting Bill, Louisa was already an established leader. She had years of business management experience from growing up in an entrepreneurial family. Bill’s strength was in Government Contracting though he had never operated his own contracting business. “When we married, we decided also to wed our professional experience and start our own Woman-Owned, Service-Disabled Vet-Owned, Small Government Contracting Business,” says Louisa. “TAPE is our baby. We created and nurtured it together.” Focused on metrics, we made our company byline, “Measure Us By Your Results®”

The Federal Government is TAPE’s primary customer. Being a veteran, Louisa cares passionately about supporting the warfighter. TAPE does this via contract awards to perform services. These include training & readiness solutions, management consulting, and technology areas such as cyber security and Risk Management Framework implementation. “I am personally committed to modernizing instructional design and incorporating Learning Science/Engineering into our guiding principles and service delivery.”

Over her 17 years in business, Louisa has traveled to visit employees across the country. She developed strong relationships with both TAPE’s employees and customers. “One of our best practices is to give each new employee the book titled, ‘How to Change the Way You See Everything’ by Kathryn Cramer and Hank Wosiak,” explains Louisa. “It is about a system the authors call, ‘Asset-Based Thinking’. It is a powerful tool to help readers learn to take an undesirable situation and turn it into a positive (an asset). I tell them that they are empowered to help their customers address issues before they become problems. This philosophy is guided by our trademarked employee byline, ‘Each One, An Entrepreneur®’.”

Having supported the Army for 13 years on a Training Resources Modeling contract, TAPE’s solution has transformed the program from legacy systems and a “waterfall” linear programming methodology to an “agile” methodology. Along the way, TAPE upgraded a mission-critical family of systems to full security compliance. Today, under three successive projects, TAPE put a compliant Risk Management Framework in place. “Our solutions greatly increased security for the Army program. In terms of impact, the result also vastly increased strategic planning capability with the “customers available training resources,” says Louisa. “We have gotten exceptional ratings from our individual customers over the years. Building brand loyalty is a constant challenge for a small government contractor,” she adds. When a retired Navy Admiral suggested to Louisa that she needed to consider how to, “Cross to the other side of the street,” she identified services that could apply in the commercial market as well. “I started an internal research project to develop a new multi-disciplinary methodology for instructional design,” she adds. “I am doing this both to fulfill my dream of enhancing competency-based, adaptive learning as well as to provide my company a strong path forward to a new revenue stream that will appeal to both military and commercial markets. The power of ‘on the job’ training has always impressed me – going back to my Army Field Training days. By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, instructional design can integrate expertise and situation awareness into the delivery of learning. The improvement must be measurable. Exactly how to best do it? Contact TAPE to discuss its progress,” adds Louisa with a smile.IE