Doug Wagoner, president and CEO of LMI as well as a two-time Wash100 Award recipient, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about a wide range of topics impacting LMI and the federal landscape as a whole during the publication’s latest Executive Spotlight interview.
During the interview, Wagoner discussed with ExecutiveBiz the long term growth plan for LMI heading into 2025 and beyond, the challenges of IT modernization in federal agencies and military branches, the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had company culture and the recent operational changes brought to our nation’s supply chain management.
“That’s the sweet spot for LMI because we have been all about logistics since 1961. We’re having our 60th anniversary this year and we’ve been able to manage logistics in all forms, including distribution, maintenance and supply. At the end of the day, that’s just all more data.”
You can read the full Executive Spotlight with 2021 Wash100 Award winner Doug Wagoner below.
ExecutiveBiz: After a stellar 2020 where LMI saw over $397M in revenue, how has your growth strategy continued to drive success this year thus far? What would you like to accomplish by the end of the year as a part of LMI’s overall 2025 growth strategy?
“Before I got there, LMI had started on a different trajectory. In terms of growth, the company had just begun to promote and invest in its own growth like it hadn’t before. I wish I could take credit for some of the big wins over the last year that you mentioned, but they were identified before I came aboard.
In terms of our long term growth, we do have a strategy to reach $750 million in revenue by 2025. By the end of 2020, we finished just under $400 million and we’ll be well above that mark by the end of this year. We are maintaining that trajectory thus far but it’s not only about growth.
There are other elements around the 2025 strategy, including our mission to diversify our client base. Presently, LMI is still about two-thirds defense clients and then roughly equal parts federal civilian, which is heavily on the healthcare side and then the intelligence community as well.
While we want to grow in all sectors, we specifically want to grow disproportionately in intel and federal health to balance out the portfolio and then LMI will be able to ride the budget swings.
The ultimate goal is top of the line growth that also leads to more customers as well as greater capabilities to sustain our growth momentum into 2025 and beyond. We have to supplement our growth in the coming years because the federal budget just doesn’t get that big and there are only so many takeaways you can have. We need to supplement our organic growth with acquisitions. We’ve been and will continue to be very active in evaluating acquisitions.”
ExecutiveBiz: In terms of reaching over $750 million in growth by 2025, how do you maintain your speed of growth and implementation of acquisitions when a company grows that fast?
“That’s a good question because you can absolutely grow too quickly. I look at the superb leadership team that we have and that I inherited. This team could easily manage LMI well past $750 million and we just have a very strong team.
LMI did an excellent job of investment in IT infrastructure. What this all really comes down to eventually is culture. I think our leadership team has done a wonderful job communicating the strategy and setting expectations. I think people are excited about that because new growth leads to new opportunities.”
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ExecutiveBiz: How is LMI utilizing its data-driven approach to maintain its company culture and create a hybrid workforce that can adapt to the current changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and telework capabilities?
“I think our response to COVID with our employees was to keep very high touch points with them from the leadership team and we kept them informed about what was going on and the latest changes. I think we did like three care packages during the height of the pandemic last year, and most of those were really kind of targeted to the kids.
The response rate on those was pretty phenomenal and I think our approach to coming back in a hybrid mode made sense moving forward because people have adjusted to working from home and we’ve been able to maintain our culture with everyone at home. So it comes down to each individual situation of, ‘How much do you really collaborate with others,’ and that determines how to move forward and keep our culture going.
We’re lucky that our headquarters in Tysons is very open and very modular with conference rooms of various sizes. When these teams come together depending on what happens for the rest of the year and early 2022, we’ll have the facilities ready for them.
Plus, the new hybrid environment that we’re all figuring out opens the aperture in terms of recruitment and looking outside the DC metro area for talent, which makes finding talent a lot easier and customers have also become much more accepting of that part as well.”
ExecutiveBiz: With several big contract awards such as the recent $211M Army contract, how is LMI working to assist government agencies and our military service branches with the agility and IT modernization capabilities they need to adapt to the current changes in our landscape?
“Data centers have been tremendously important for a long time. I think in our senior leadership ranks, either on the defense or civilian side of the government, we’ve been collecting data for a very long time. The cost of data storage has also dropped significantly over the last decade.
Federal agencies have collected an ocean of data just to store it, but they’re just realizing the power of the technology and the tools they can put on it. In a lot of cases, they’re struggling with specific questions such as, ‘What do they have? How is it curated? How do they access it? Who has the rights to it?’
And that’s the sweet spot for LMI because we have been all about logistics since 1961. We’re having our 60th anniversary this year and we’ve been able to manage logistics in all forms, including distribution, maintenance and supply. At the end of the day, that’s just all more data.
So it’s been a real natural progression for us to effectively help our customers leverage the data that we know best, which is logistics and use that to the best of our ability while we expand our digital capability and digital IQ.”
ExecutiveBiz: With cybersecurity heavily influencing changes to our supply chain operations, what do we need to do to adapt to the latest threats and operational changes brought to our nation’s supply chains as a result of advanced technology and the COVID-19 pandemic?
“For the last 30 years, the government industry has been focused on keeping supply chains as efficient as possible. In terms of logistics, we were sounding the alarm years ago about supply chain resiliency and security. It’s great to be very efficient, but by doing so you’re depending upon one plan for all the marbles.
There’s that element and then there’s the question of supply chain security, which is essentially our national security. If you look at the precious metals that are out that are required for specific electronic components. The Chinese own 90 percent of those raw metals around the globe.
There are just a lot of aspects of supply chain security and resiliency. There is also the climate to consider, the political disruptions as well. We’re in full force and there’s a lot more interest in our supply chain management, security and resiliency.”