LSINC is also a member of the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce, and Ryan noted that she has been a Chamber board member for years. The company has also been involved in the National Space Club, with Ryan spending many years involved with the organization. “UAH College of Business, those types of things, but it’s also Girl Scouts, it’s just trying to help kids…that’s kind of our thing,” she explained.

The company website lists a set of corporate values. Asked whether this was established individually by her or as a team effort, Ryan responded that “it was definitely a team effort.” She recently conducted a performance evaluation with the company leaders and found that they all thought similarly despite very different backgrounds.

Ryan noted that “they all had the same fundamental beliefs of, you know, “do the right thing, your family comes first, we want to make a difference in the world,” adding “I think a culture sometimes attracts those people that really help make it, and it pushes out those that don’t. I would say it’s definitely shared, not something that comes from me. We all get in the room and say what they should be…the last time we did it was just a couple months ago, and we started with a book.”

Ryan picked up a book entitled “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm” by Verne Harnish, setting it on the table. She explained that the book discusses how to establish a business’s core values.

“It says to bring your leadership in and pick three people in the company that represent your values. Well, we did that and were surprised that almost all of us picked the same people. So then we said ‘well, what do they represent?’ And we built our new list of core values based on that. It was really cool,” she said.

“It was not so much about what we wanted them to be, it was more who already represented what we wanted them to be, and then how do we expand upon those employees. Surprisingly, none of them were leaders. Not that the leaders don’t have values, but it was interesting to see. And they were literally from all over. One was in manufacturing on the floor, one was in finance, and one was in government,” Ryan noted.

Starting and operating a business, particularly one as multifaceted as LSINC, presents challenges when it comes to balancing work and personal life. When asked how she creates that balance, Ryan laughed. “I don’t do a very good job at balancing my work and personal life, I’ll be the first one to tell you that.”

After giving it some thought, she replied “It’s all a circle. Things that we do in the community are things I believe in, and my family is involved in all of it. This is the first building we don’t have a children’s office in. From the very first day we had a children’s room in all of our other offices. My kids grew up in the company…my whole family works in this company, so I try to have that be true for everybody.” She added that the company often hires the children of its employees as co-ops.

“But it’s hard to balance, there’s really no way to balance unless you just make it all about the same thing. My kid may tell me 20 years from now that they disagreed with what I did but at least it allowed me to have them near me,” she added.

When asked to discuss the best part of her CEO role at LSINC, Ryan replied “watching people take their ideas to reality. I mean, that is our tagline and it’s absolutely true.”

Referring to her company’s newest innovation, the high speed, high resolution Perivallo360m UV digital printing machine, Ryan recalled a recent lemons-to-lemonade story that unfolded during the pandemic: “[It] was our CTO’s vision. During Covid we almost shut down and I didn’t want to. We had clients that didn’t pay–we had a million dollars and they just stuck us. We didn’t lay off one person. We went three shifts so that we could span out back there, and we sunk all our money into building machines ahead of time without clients.

It was the scariest time I’ve had in the history of the company. He came up with a way to design that machine so that we either had the parts or could get the parts because of all the supply chain issues. So that’s our Covid baby. That Covid baby’s going to be our biggest seller,” she said.

“Knowing that we had a team that was able to have that much ingenuity and pride in what they wanted to do was astounding. Now, of course, I was also giving up cars and praying that we were going to eat, but we made it through.”

Ryan added that a major U.S. manufacturer bought one of those machines sight unseen, with an order from another company paid in full prior to shipment. “People are coming to see it and we’re getting a lot of visibility, even worldwide…we think this year will be good.”

Asked whether she anticipates LSINC expanding its range of products and services in the future, Ryan responded that the machines the company has been building recently are what’s going to expand. “I would be shocked if we don’t double this year,” she said.

Ryan’s advice to people considering starting their own business: “It’s hard. It’s very hard. I think you have to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons…I mean, it’s a lot of hardship and you gotta want to do it for the people, not for the money. It doesn’t work if you worry about money. Money comes and goes…you’ll have bad days, you’ll have good days, you’ll go through tornadoes, you’ll go through shutdowns, you’ll go through Covid. If you don’t do it for the right reasons you won’t stick in there. Know what your reasons are and stick to them.”

Ryan provided an additional piece of advice: “Once you decide, don’t give up. Trust me, there’s many days I wish I could. There’s also many days that you just sit in awe.”

She illustrated that sense of awe by explaining that during the Covid pandemic, she created a campaign to turn the business around. “If they build the six machines and sell $6 million, which we’re on track to do by March 31st, every employee on this side of the business gets a bonus, from the janitor all the way up to the CTO.”

“So we did it differently,” she continued. “A lot of times you do bonuses based on one person, and I said ‘no, this time, shared accountability, shared responsibility, right? Shared reward. That’s what we’re going to do together.’ So, I said, ‘everyone’s going to get the same dollar amount.’” Ryan said it’s caused everyone to take ownership. For example, “the janitor is a woman, she’s in her fifties…and she figured out how to get the building cleaned in six hours so she can spend at least two hours building on those machines every day.”

“I’m so proud of that,” Ryan said. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of that, ‘cause here she is, a woman who’s like ‘I never knew I could do all that stuff!’…I’m very proud of that, to have a place where people can have the opportunity to see something different about who they are.”