Greenbelt company soars to success after stereotypical start

Entrepreneurs take great pride in building a business from scratch, developing financial security, and planning for the future. For Ian Mulira, however, success is about something more. “It allows me to sleep at night, which was tough for the first eight years or so,” he said with a smile. An electrical engineer by trade, Mulira was working for the U.S. Department of Defense as a civilian contractor during the early 2000s. His specialty was building automation systems (known in the trade as BAS), which connect and automate building functions from heating and air conditioning to fire and security systems. “I loved what I was doing,” he recalled in a recent interview in the Greenbelt office of his company, Conquest Solutions.