Ryan Beardsley's path to government contracting was anything but conventional, and that's precisely his strength. With a background spanning agriculture, manufacturing, and service industries, Ryan built his career on a simple operating principle: stay curious, ask the questions others won't, and never assign work you aren't willing to do yourself. That philosophy carried him through his tenure at Deployed Resources, a national emergency response organization, where he rose from field operations specialist to Director of Field Operations Resources. There he directed a $6.5M strategic real estate acquisition program, managed a 120,000-square-foot facility portfolio, deployed enterprise access control across 12 facilities nationwide, supported emergency base camp operations serving up to 2,000 people during critical missions, and oversaw credentialing operations processing more than 1,600 federal clearances and credentials — including CBP Tier 4, TWIC, and FEMA — with 100% regulatory compliance.

 

At DEFTEC, Ryan serves as Director of Strategic Operations and Innovation and Information Systems Officer, where he functions as the connective tissue between people, process, and technology. He leads the company's CMMC and NIST SP 800-171 cybersecurity compliance program, architected DEFTEC's enterprise AI governance framework and systematically modernizes internal operations through intelligent workflow automation, transforming manual processes across finance, HR, contracts, and security into resilient, auditable systems supporting DEFTEC's 150-person workforce across classified and unclassified environments.

 

A systems thinker with a farmer's practicality, Ryan approaches every challenge the same way: understand it from the ground up, improve it, and make sure the people who depend on it are better off. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies with a focus in Agroecology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.