Small Business Spotlight: Talking faith and business with South Huntsville’s Mission Driven Research

The mission of Mission Driven Research (MDR) is quite clear, although it’s a little bit of a play on words.

Incorporated in 2011 by four friends who attended church together, Mission Driven Research is exactly what the name states. It’s a team of 50 or so professionals providing technical services to the federal government driven by the various military missions that it supports.

But the greater mission, said MDR Chief Mission Officer Zach Johnson, is in the world around us, helping communities near and far.

“The mission for Mission Driven Research has two meanings,” explained Johnson. “On the for-profit side it means we want to complete the mission for our customers. We want to excel at that. But the other meaning is we also want to live on mission, which is, for us as Christians, living for something bigger than ourselves, living for the Gospel and advancing the kingdom. So that’s the double meaning of the mission.”

MDR was founded by three friends: Chris Gordon, Ryan Ezell and Ben Weller.

The idea originated with Gordon – initially the only engineer in the group – who felt challenged in his career as an engineer to find a way to do business with an emphasis on missions. He found it by launching MDR.

From the beginning, MDR had two components: A for-profit engineering firm and a non-profit ministry, the goal of which was to spend the company’s profits giving back and specifically engage MDR employees on which community missions to support.

“At the time,” Gordon said, “I was looking at my salary and I thought I can keep trying to raise that salary and give out of that. But then I could see how much my old company was charging for my hours, and I was like there’s a big gap there where if I tapped into that, then I could give a lot more. And then if we had five or six people all doing that, then we could do even more than we could do individually. Having the resources of the company kind of behind all that, it just seemed like a big opportunity.”

MDR primarily supports missile defense with employees scattered throughout Redstone Arsenal supporting various programs. But another mission that motivates at MDR is finding interesting technical work that matters.

“We have people that are the perfect people, but we have to find work that makes sense for them,” Gordon said. “We’ve set a goal of doubling or tripling in the next four to five years. We’re definitely on pace to do that. Part of it is, four to five years from now all of our contracts at MDA are going to be recompeted so we want to build some stability outside of MDA. We’re actively pursuing work at NASA, Army, MSIC and other agencies, to diversify.”

Johnson meets with every new employee at MDR to discover their passions and how the ministry-side of the business can help employees be successful with their personal callings. This looks like supporting international mission trips, like Gordon’s heart for Nepal, as well as local community non-profits like the Cornerstone Initiative and Kids to Love, and even loving on employee’s families by sending Uber Eats to the wife of an employee who is out of town. 

“It’s such a blessing to be able to just say yes or when a crisis happens, I don’t have to get any permission I can just jump in and just serve our people,” Johnson said. “These people are image bearers, have equal dignity, value and worth, and so my whole job is just making sure through the nonprofit and through the for profit that they have all their needs met, physical, emotional, spiritual.”

Johnson touches base with every MDR employee at least once a month. He coordinates company culture events like employee lunches and the company softball team, the Lunar Llamas, which won this year’s D League championship in the Mars Softball Club on Redstone Arsenal.

The mission extends internationally into several countries, including Nepal, which is one of Gordon’s passions. Shortly after starting MDR, a friend had just returned from a mission trip there and reached out to Gordon because the village needed an engineer.

“I was like, I don’t think you need my type of engineer, they might need a real engineer. I’m not a real engineer. Anyway I went over there with our church, and they needed an engineer to basically redesign wheelchairs.

“They were building wheelchairs out of bicycle wheels and steel pipes. They were homemade construction welded together and were like 7 ft long and 77 pounds. They were large and the average Nepali is like 120 pounds, so they wanted somebody to come and redesign that. Part of their mission activity there was helping handicapped people get mobility.”

Gordon brought the challenge back to MDR and to a student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville to redesign the wheelchairs and come up with a new design for his senior project.

“We went back the next year. The student came with us, and we gave them the redesigned wheelchair. They were able to take the design and do something with it and ended with these multi-purpose, big, heavy ones for city situations where you’re on flat roads and not going very far, and the other ones are a little more mobile for hills.”

MDR sends a team of employees to Nepal at least once a year.

It’s missional budget is 10 percent of the projected income each year, but when they crunch the numbers it’s well over that. In the first ten years, MDR invested 50 percent of its profits in its people and ministries.

“They (the owners) take a regular paycheck like everybody else,” Johnson explained, “and all that extra that usually goes into distributions to lake houses, to Lamborghinis, they’ve given that back to the employees first, and then what’s left over goes to the nonprofit that we use to serve all over the world. These three guys are willing to forego this short windfall in order to invest in more eternal things. That’s the big picture.”