The Founders
Baxter Smith brings executive leadership and C-suite relationship experience as President. Brett Manning drives contract development and market growth as Director of Business Development. Together they cover every dimension of winning and keeping federal contracts.
Brett Manning brings a career built on operations, logistics, and systems thinking. As founder and operator of AA Dispatch for five years, he built and ran a commercial dispatch operation from the ground up — managing drivers, clients, and complex logistics under real operational pressure every single day.
His career spans Delta Airlines, where he developed deep operational discipline in a high-stakes institutional environment, and Intuit, where he works in a technology-forward professional setting alongside co-founder Baxter Smith. Brett understands how large organizations procure services, what reliability means to institutional buyers, and how to deliver it without excuses.
Growing up in a military family — father in the Army, brothers in the Coast Guard and Marine Corps — Brett's approach to business is shaped by the same values he watched modeled his entire life: accountability, follow-through, and mission above all else. He brings that same standard to every contract Ironstone pursues.
Baxter Smith is a business leader who's spent the last decade+ building real relationships instead of chasing spreadsheets. He's worked the enterprise sales trenches, led customer success teams from scratch, and sat at the table with C-suite folks in tech and insurance — always believing that trust is the actual product, and everything else is just paperwork.
At Salesforce, he brought in half a million in new revenue in one quarter (not that he's counting, but also, he's counting). At TRAX Analytics, he built a customer success org from a blank whiteboard, cut churn by 30%, and grew upsell revenue by 25% — because keeping people happy turns out to be good business, wild concept. At Intuit, he and his business partner Brett Manning stewarded a portfolio of big enterprise accounts, the kind where the accounts felt like actual humans, not line items.
Baxter brings that same "people over paperwork" ethos to Ironstone: protecting relationships, earning real trust, and turning one good contract into a decade-long partnership. In federal contracting terms, it's the difference between a Contracting Officer who gives you a second shot and one who just hands you the keys.