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, one of the early employees, you know, was with them all the way through to COO when they went public. And then he had paid a transition and has been CEO of a number of other defense firms. So anyways, his book is, it's a zero to a billion.
It's, and I have it over here, 61 rules entrepreneurs need to know to grow a government contract in business. So interesting enough, when you go Google or Amazon that term, you know, entrepreneurial rules in our space there's not many titles or good titles out there. His has had really good reviews, so picked it up six years ago. Then from that, actually reached out to David, and he spoke at one of our off-sites, and then he's been working with us since. I mean, his book just really dices out the business from the culture side.
That's that there's a whole element of culture chapter on that people side gives you the mechanics of sales and growth and then really the mechanics around operations and then really the last piece to it is really the strategic and M&A side of things which is a big piece of the GovCon space and in how it works so for sure that's the management blueprint that most impacted me.
Okay so there are 61 rules which is quite a lot of rules to implement. What are the most important ones that you first latched on and you embraced in the Lockwood Group?
Sure. So the first one, culture, is really a part of strategy. Culture is a differentiator, which especially holds true in professional services businesses. I mean, we are our folk, our people, and we're only the power of the team we build and the team we deliver to our customers. So culture and really spending the time to think through and develop what is our culture, which is really built upon our core values. And I'd say that's one very strong rule. And that's on that one section, the growth section, I'll kind of unwrap from each section just off memory, I think on the growth section, outside of the mechanics of just how to do effective sales, which I mean, I think very good points in there. One that he, you know, kind of holds true is, is having in your strategy that you bid four jobs that double your company every year.
Developing a strong culture based on core values is a crucial rule.Share on X
So every year you build your pipeline, you build your pipeline for the year with four jobs that can double, or I mean, we call it game-changing, double or greater your company each year. And the logic there is you win one. So you win one, it's a successful year. So that's kind of on the growth side. On the upside, one that sticks out in my mind is that your operations should never grow linearly or greater than, you know, your growth on your, you know, overall revenue size. And, you know, GovCon, I think, is unique. I mean, other professional services are some, you know, you got to be conscious of your costs. So that's really the third one.
So you have to scale your organization, you cannot just add one person for each job, So you have to ratchet up the earning per person, so to say, of the organization so that you are becoming more profitable. It's a really big trap in professional services, especially GovCon, to just add bodies and make the business more complex and the profitability doesn't grow and ultimately the risk is increasing with every person. Okay, that's a really good one. So what else? Anything else that stands out?
I mean, the closing points and the book is just, you know, building with a thought on the future. And even, you know, I gave GovCon one of those things where, and not to get into the details, but size and how you grow are very, it's deliberate and there's gotta be a plan around it. So having, don't be so much, you know, focused on, you know, numbers per se, but really be pointed at a strategy, be pointed at a vision. Mischievous is really kind of where we come about it. And really, you're not an expert at one thing, but you're there to solve the problem. And it's really built upon a vision of purpose and really established the foundation of the business around that.
So how is a government contracting professional services firm different from one that is serving the private market?
I think the big one of the bigger pieces is obviously the elements of compliance that involves delivering services. And it depends. And obviously, the layers of compliance vary depending on the agency that you're working with. Now, we're one of our primary customers is the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense is one of the higher tier compliance entities out there. We talked about before about building your business and the operations side of things consciously.
Well, you also have to balance the consciousness with also building the business to be able to deliver and meet the requirements of your customer. The levels of compliance and elements, just to kind of give details of just being very conscious of your security. I mean, obviously we're all very aware of what's going on in the world of cyber. Really on the front end of that is the defense department and all entities involved in it. And then also service providers as much or have to be built to operate in that space.
You have to balance the consciousness with building the business to be able to deliver and meet the requirements of your customer.Share on X
And I mean, yeah, so that's one complexity too. And then outside of that, I mean, from a financial perspective, I mean, I just mentioned one other area I'd see of the operational side that requires more extensive investment than I think the non-government side is, you know, the financial accounting side. Because again, you're not only, you've got to do the mechanics of what you do in any business to meet the requirements of the IRS. But from our standpoint, you know, we're audited multiple times.
We're audited on that end, but we're also audited by the TARP and Defense, and we're audited at layers below that pre-shop. So, I mean, just the levels of complexity, and again, it tiers up,
