Sit Down With Success: A Conversation With Alicia Ryan of LSINC
Sitdown with Success is a feature of the Huntsville Business Journal on entrepreneurs and their keys to success. This month’s subject is Alicia Ryan and her success with LSINC.
Huntsville is renowned for its game-changing innovators in both business and technology. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Alicia Ryan, LSINC is one of those game changers: not only with Huntsville’s small business community, but with the greater Huntsville community itself.
LSINC, located at 490 Discovery Drive NW in Cummings Research Park, is committed not only to the pursuit of excellence, but also to its employees. This first became apparent when I was asked to reschedule my interview following a death in one of the employees’ families, as the funeral was scheduled for the same time.
Following a brief tour of the building, which included a look at the company’s innovative new direct-to-object printing machine, Ryan welcomed me into her office for a conversation about her and her business.
When I entered Ryan’s bright corner office, the first thing that caught my eye was a number of beautiful stained glass pieces decorating the windows. Ryan told me that all but one were created by her and her daughter, with the remaining piece designed for her by their former stained glass instructor who has since moved out of state. “Stained glass is my way of relaxing,” she said with a smile.
While LSINC began in 2008 under the simple premise of helping senior leaders in tech businesses develop better business strategies, it has since grown to provide a range of services including product development, engineering, strategy and strategic communications, and intelligence and security services.
When asked what drew her attention to this shortage and why she sought to address it, Ryan explained that she had done something very similar when she lived in Virginia, but ended up moving to Huntsville for her husband’s job, putting her career on hold for two years.
“When I decided to go back to work I had a master’s in organizational leadership and my entire career was a strategist helping people [figure out] where to take technologies and things like that. That wasn’t a job here–in Huntsville you’re either an engineer or something else, you know.”
That changed when “a couple people asked me to put up a shingle…we had a $500-$600,000 backlog within six months. So it was not a planned thing…I did it because I had to,” she said.
Ryan’s academic background is in Organizational Leadership, Industrial Organizational Psychology, and Information Management. Asked what led to her entrance into a STEM industry, she responded that when she graduated from school, there weren’t many job options.
Prior to her arrival in Huntsville, Ryan’s career brought her into the defense arena, where she worked as a consultant. “You know, kind of funny because I never thought I’d do that after coming out of a military family, being raised in the military. It was the last thing I thought I would do, go to work for the military. I took a job with a defense contractor and it was a lot of STEM.
And so I found myself not knowing what to do. That’s why I started getting my master’s in Information Management. I wanted to learn what it was I was working around,” she said.
With nearly a full degree’s worth of courses in Information Management, Ryan ended up switching to Organizational Leadership: “I probably should have just gotten two degrees, but I loved organizational leadership a lot more,” she explained.
Ryan soon discovered her gift for creating a bridge between people working in technology and business. “I found that engineers don’t always tell the best stories, you know. They don’t always represent the business side of why we should do something. And the business people don’t always understand the technologies that have the ability to move, and so that was really how I found my niche, being able to bridge–it’s actually what Leadership Strategies Inc. is.”
Ryan went to the whiteboard to draw the LSINC logo, explaining that it’s a stylized bridge representing the environment and market on one side, the client and technology on the other, and LSINC forming the bridge between.
“So we would do the assessments that would determine whether that technology had a market. It was originally Leadership Strategies Incorporated,” she explained.
After about three years of focusing on strategic analysis, Ryan said, “we decided it was the time in our lives to do it ourselves, so we acquired a company, and that company did all the product development. We went from being analysts who analyzed technologies and helped companies figure out where to go to a company that did it. Now we’re really more known for the product development and the government work that we do than for the strategies anymore.”
LSINC now offers a broad range of services and solutions, raising the question of how Ryan can manage this kind of diversity in a manner that ensures consistent overall quality.
“With a really good leadership team,” she answered. “I mean, I’m a very firm believer in surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me, and they are. I’ve got a phenomenal Chief Technology Officer who’s now got dozens of patents under him and manages all the engineers. I’ve got a gentleman who runs all of the government side with a whole slew of leaders under him, and I’ve just got a great team.”
“I don’t do it,” she added. “I hopefully orchestrate it.”
When asked what she believes the trick is for fostering a positive corporate culture, Ryan immediately responded “truth and honesty, and allowing for creativity.”
Ryan expressed pride in her company putting its values into action, citing the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering (ASCTE) as an example: “I’m the president of that foundation, it sits in this building.
But the beginning of it came from the work that we were doing in the community and a couple of us going back and forth to Montgomery to get the legislation passed. We started the foundation that raised the money,” she recalled.
“We wanted to make sure that if we were going to do community work, it was going to be community work that actually represents who we were. So, being able to help children in cyber and engineering was key. So that’s a perfect example–not just doing it, but trying to live it. If you know anything about ASCTE, I’m as proud of that as I am of the company. It’s a really great thing,” Ryan continued, adding that she currently runs the ASCTE Foundation and sits on the State Board.
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