About
First Place Business Solutions integrates strategy, innovation, and investment decisions for clients operating at the edge of technical and competitive complexity.
The firm
First Place Business Solutions, LLC (FPBS) provides tailored consulting and training for organizations that must connect long-range strategy, innovation portfolios, and internal technology investment. The practice works with large and small clients—defense and aerospace ecosystems, federal R&D sponsors and performers, and technology-led businesses building discipline as they grow.
Engagements emphasize actionable plans, transparent decision support, and—where appropriate—tools teams can sustain after the assignment ends. The firm is also bringing AI engineering into selected offerings—for example, intelligent workflows around planning and portfolio tools and domain-grounded assistants—when an engagement warrants it and client constraints allow. Technical depth, training background, and illustrative applications are summarized on steven-griggs.com; FPBS remains the channel for consulting engagements.
Principal
Steven Griggs, PhD, leads FPBS. His background spans decades in advanced aircraft and R&D program leadership—including extended program management within the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works—as well as roles with other advanced design organizations. He has worked across idea generation, prototyping, commercialization strategy, and business capture for pursuits ranging from modest contracts to very large programs.
Dr. Griggs holds a PhD in engineering, an MBA in finance and strategy, a Master of Arts in economics, and a post-doctoral bridge in international business and entrepreneurship. He has taught in professional MBA and graduate entrepreneurship programs on strategy, corporate entrepreneurship, technology commercialization, innovation design, and related topics, and has consulted for organizations such as the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, in addition to small and mid-size businesses. He continues to deepen practice in AI engineering—LLMs, agents, retrieval-grounded systems, and production deployment—so FPBS can offer value-added intelligent decision support in line with client needs; details remain on his personal site rather than as performance claims on this company site.
I founded FPBS to help leaders see strategy, innovation, and investment as one system—so technical excellence actually reaches the mission and the market.
For an extended biography, publications, and other professional materials, visitors may refer to the principal’s personal site at steven-griggs.com—consulting engagements remain centered on First Place Business Solutions.