Promise and Purpose

Raymond F. Lopez, Jr. was an E4 Third Class Petty Officer in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and his division had just gotten back from a cruise in the Western Pacific, when the leading chief aboard the ship received orders to send one officer back out. Nobody wanted to go, but Senior Chief Snyder had an incredible command of authority, and when he pointed at Ray, the young sailor thought it was settled: he’d be the one to go. But much to Ray’s surprise, the Chief had something else in mind. “I want to keep you,” he said, “because you have promise.”

Ray had never considered himself a model sailor, but those words planted a seed of ambition in his mind that began to grow over the coming years. When he was an E5, he decided to apply to the Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program in the hopes of studying oceanography at the University of Washington. To apply, he had to retake his college boards and send for transcripts from his parochial high school. When they arrived, he reviewed them and noticed a note from the nuns he had overlooked before. “Although quite popular socially, Raymond shows a lack of purpose,” it said.

Promise and purpose. He knew he had both, and he resolved to bring them out by applying for the officer program. With that, he started attending night classes at St. Leo College at Fort Eustis. He took challenging courses, and his wife, Carol, would stay up late to help with his accounting homework. The Lopezes decided they were going to get through it together, and the promise that Chief Snyder had seen in Ray began to transform his career. Now, after retiring from a phenomenal career in the Navy as a commander, Ray is the founder, President, and CEO of Engineering Services Network, Inc. (ESN), continuing to bring his promise and purpose to life by providing mission-critical services to the military and federal government.

Ray launched ESN in February of 1995 after rising up through the enlisted ranks as a Chief Sonar Technician and retiring in November of 1994. “I didn’t know anything about business, but after spending almost three decades in the Navy, I felt I was uniquely qualified to help sailors and make their lives a little easier,” he recalls. “When Space and Warfare Systems Command and Naval Sea Systems Command were still located in Crystal City, I’d walk the halls, talk to people to get a sense of what was going on, and then go home at night to figure out how I could help.”

After he began closing deals, he then had to actually solve the technical problems at hand, but thanks to his affinity for technology like radar, sonar, communications, and computer networks, things continued to fall into place. Within the first year, he had five employees. The following year, he got involved in the 8(a) Business Development Program, which helped put ESN on solid ground and develop its infrastructure as a professional engineer assignment company. ESN then got involved with the Department of Defense (DoD) Mentor-Protégé Program, which changed the course of the company’s future.

As part of the program, ESN was mentored by Anteon and won the Nunn-Perry Award for outstanding mentor-protégé teams. “The program helps you see what you need to do to move your company forward,” Ray explains. “By putting together action diagrams, hiring a contracts officer and a quality manager, and implementing consistent and standardized forms and procedures, we landed a contract in 2000 and did the work with enough efficiency and innovation that we have won it each award year since.”

Today, the company has over 250 employees and four divisions, preserving its culture despite its growth and maintaining a 91 percent employee retention rate. Its Maritime Division is the largest in the country and consists of their Coast Guard, Navy, and Submarine Corps work. Their Air Land Division serves the Army and the Air Force, which they knew little about until Ray hired a two-star general, who in turn hired the A6 and CIO of Global Strike Command. “It’s a different mentality, but by hiring the right people, we were able to really build that program out,” he affirms. ESN’s Federal IT Solutions division serves agencies like the VA, while its final division handles DoD work that is specifically D.C.-focused.

Broadly speaking, ESN delivers trusted solutions that support national defense, working shoulder to shoulder with sailors and troops to improve mission readiness. Through one contract, its employees serve as Combat Systems Maintenance Coordinators, working on teams with government workers and maintenance manager contractors to handle daily communications, electronics, command and control systems, and computer network problems on aircraft carriers. They also map out the availability of the ship’s workforce and what needs to be done to prepare a ship for redeployment. Through another contract, ESN has focused on the consolidation of multiple commands, saving tens of millions of dollars for the Federal government. “The Navy was my mistress for a very long time, so it’s been important to me to take everything I’ve garnered throughout my career, both technically and morally, and use to help current servicemen and women,” Ray explains. “I was a rowdy kid when I started, but I had a successful command tour before I retired. I worked hard for the Navy, and the Navy worked for me, so I wanted to pay that back in some way.”

Working hard wasn’t always at the forefront of Ray’s thoughts through his unruly youth, but it was written in that inner promise of his from the time he was a young boy growing up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His father, a product of the 1930s who joined the service when he was 16, had an incredible work ethic. He worked in a hotel as a master chef, and Ray can still remember the day his father hired him on to help in the kitchen at age thirteen. He placed a thousand pounds of potatoes in front of his son, armed him with four potato peelers, and instructed him to make oven browns. “That was day one,” Ray recounts. “The oven browns had to be shaped a certain way, and laid out on the baking trays like so. I worked for my father for four years, and I knew I wanted to pursue something different with my life.”

The oldest of five children, Ray played baseball and football, sang in the choir, and swam competitively in high school. To earn spending money, he bagged groceries at the local Acme Supermarket for tips and caddied at the country club. He worked at a deli, and as a pool boy and a lifeguard at the High Ho Silver Motel. But work was as much about respecting his father as it was about earning money. “I inherited my father’s work ethic and my mother’s compassion, and I always treated both with respect,” he remembers. “She was tough, and he was quiet. They were like yin and yang.”

Ray wasn’t really interested in school, but the stern approaches of the nuns and priests prepared him for boot camp. His mother was from a well-to-do family but didn’t finish high school, and his father had been a ward of the Catholic Church as a child, so college was not talked about. Upon graduating from high school, he considered Morningstar and Tulane, and was nominated to the Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, but he ultimately chose the Navy like his father. He spent his first eleven weeks stationed in San Diego, where he met Carol, the woman who would become his wife. “I had actually gotten kicked out of the Navy’s electronics school and was sent to a ship overseas,” Ray recalls. “When I came back, I met her. She was in town on a trip for legal secretaries, and we hit it off. For the first time, because of her, I began wanting to do more with my life.”

Thanks to Carol’s stabilizing love and support, coupled with Senior Chief Snyder’s belief in him, Ray began to grow by leaps and bounds socially and professionally. The first time he applied to become a Limited Duty Officer (LDO), he didn’t make it, so he tried again, and was ultimately among the 200 out of 2,000 candidates to be commissioned. The year was 1977, and John Disher was the Commanding Officer at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, later to retire as the Naval Chief of Personnel. John had never worked with a former enlisted like Ray, but they got along well. “I’m very fortunate,” he says. “Most of the people I’ve worked for were excellent leaders who did the right thing.”

Through his Naval career, Ray developed a leadership style that balances firmness with compassion for the experiences people have been through. He couples passion with discretion and is careful not to act rashly. “I remind myself that the first report back from the battle is not necessarily the full and correct report,” he says. “I try to get all sides of a story, and then I take action by making a decision. I don’t wait things out, but instead confront them head on.”

Toward the end of Ray’s Navy career, he and Carol moved their family to a rural town in West Virginia, where he grew passionate about coaching at a local high school. He might have liked to stay there to teach and coach after retiring from service, but Carol was tired of driving 42 miles through the mountains to the nearest large full-service grocery store. He had learned during his last tour that there were many military personnel, civil servants, and contractors in Washington, D.C. who wanted to do the right thing for the military and the country, so the Lopezes decided to move to the nation’s capital and try their hand at starting a business. “We didn’t have time to worry—we just jumped into it, so we had to make it work,” Ray remembers. “We had to build the company, pay off our debts, and succeed. I spoke to everyone in the Navy, from seamen to admirals, and it was almost like I never left. I was willing to help out with anything.”

In imagining ESN, Ray wanted to build a company the size of a destroyer—between 250 and 380 people—because it would be big enough to have the kind of impact he envisioned, but small enough to maintain the company culture borne from his experiences in the Navy, with his family, and through life. “Our company is like a ship,” he says. “It’s a culture of interdependence, in which the mission isn’t successful unless everyone pulls together and works together.”

Ray originally thought he’d grow ESN and sell it for $10 million, but his goals evolved as rapidly and unpredictably as the company itself. Its revenue rose to $52 million several years ago, but has fluctuated somewhat due to contractual changes, the unique challenges of mid-tier companies, and uncertainty stemming from sequestration and the political climate. Now, Ray aspires to organically grow the company to $100 million, and though ESN continues to evolve, Ray is confident it will retain the culture that has landed it on the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce list of finalists for its Contractor of the Year GovCon Award in 2012. That same year, Ray himself was a finalist for Executive of the Year.

Even with the challenges of leading a mid-tier company through constantly changing terrain, Ray makes time to give back, whether he’s mentoring others or talking to groups of service-disabled veterans about how to succeed in business and give back to the service they came from. As a company, ESN believes in working for the betterment of the nation while also making a positive, intentioned impact in the local community, so every organization in the company supports charitable efforts in its own geographic location. Whether it’s supporting the Joy Fund to help supply toys to thousands of children in need in Tidewater, Virginia; supporting the efforts of charities working with battered mothers and children in Arlington; or helping veterans; the company is focused on its impact at home as much as it works to achieve national and even global results.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Ray emphasizes the importance of asking questions. “If you don’t ask, you’ll never learn,” he explains. “Seek the advice of knowledgeable individuals. Do something you’re interested in and have an affinity for.” For people interested in going into business, he underscores the reality that no two days are the same. “Expect the unexpected,” he avows. “Don’t be afraid to take risks and venture into the unknown, but get an idea of what the consequences could be. Make sure those risks are reasonable and qualified.”

And above all, Ray’s story shows the importance of paying success forward so that others can realize their promise and achieve their purpose in life. It’s the arc that connects him back to the Navy and the future sailors who benefit from ESN’s help. And, because he and Carol have committed to fund the education of their grandchildren, it’s the thread that connects him to future generations of his family. “I believe paying it back and paying it forward is so important because I want to see people succeed,” he says. “We live in the greatest country on Earth, and it’s important to do what we can to improve society and the worth of our fellow man. There’s promise and purpose in all of us, and everyone can use their potential to achieve success and change the world.”

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