https://youtu.be/7cwy_Ms-izA
Jim Lockwood is the co-founder of The Lockwood Group and serves as Vice President responsible for driving growth, creating value, and executing objectives across Lockwood’s markets. We talk about the concept of mission readiness, the IBM alignment model, and the gap between public and private sector infrastructure.
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Become Mission Ready with Jim Lockwood
Our guest is Jim Lockwood, the co-founder and CEO of the Lockwood Group, which is a professional services and solutions firm that makes the Department of Defense and other federal agencies mission ready through the delivery and application of logistics, training, enterprise and consulting services. Jim is responsible for driving growth, creating value and executing objectives across Lockwood's market. So welcome to the show, Jim.
Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.
I'm excited to have you here. And I want to start by asking about your entrepreneurial journey. How did you end up running your family's business with your father? How did you get there?
Great first question, Steve. Yeah, so, you know, really kind of reflects me back. I think there's two defining moments that really said this was my destiny. I mean, one, and I'd say it's not so much a defining moment, one specific moment. But as a kid, funny enough, business was what I most often played and was involved in as a child. I always had, and that's really, the underlying to my entrepreneurial journey is just the love for business. I mean, I've just had an absolute passion for the aspects of business, problem solving.
And that showed up, again, as a child, when I remember Christmas one year where my gift was an office setup. It was a briefcase and office setup and that's what my parents got me. And so that kind of set the foundation for the business. And then segueing that to my college years, my college years, I had varying internships like most college folks do in their college years. And for some reason, I always chose the hardest ones. One year I was selling insurance for a summer as a college intern.
And then the year following that, I decided to choose an even harder internship where I was going and doing door-to-door sales for a full summer in a full suit in imagine 90, 100 degree heat. And really, I mean, what that taught me for those three, four months was just the perseverance and hard work and just going through that, waking up every day and literally was doing that six days a week.
My college roommates thought I was nuts and probably partly was, but it was really that learning that I had that hard work and I was wired with that element of perseverance and persistence that those data points tied to really kind of what the journey started when my father and I started the company, what is now 11 years ago.
All right. So you're here, you're running the business with your father, and you are in this services business, professional services. So my question to you is that, was there a management blueprint or a business framework that particularly inspired you that you adopted for your business? Or it may be just a book that you, you know, gleaned some concepts from that you, you implanted in your business and, and it made your business better.
Yes. And, you know, after, after, you know, we had the initial discussion, I think we hit, I hit on, you know, what would say is the foundation of a lot of the blueprint we use, which comes from a long time advisor, personal mentor to me, a gentleman by the name of David Krugman. He was at original, one of the very early employees of a company called SRA. SRA was kind of a world beater, a true innovator in the professional service space within the government back in the 80s.
I mean, I'm so wired on the stories just through working with them for so long. I know that they came, you know, they were former Air Force. They really had a real strong model around culture, customer-centric services. And he, you know, as an early, you know,