Working: After striking out three times with a hire, firm assesses its culture

This has been a memorable year for Lani Hay: She won a prestigious national women’s entrepreneurship award and her defense contracting firm brought in $80 million in new contracts, equal to four years of revenue.

Even as she expanded her payroll by some 100 people in the past year, Hay ran into a speed bump when she tried to recruit a chief operating officer, her No. 2 position.

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She hired one, then a second and a third. None of them lasted long, but they taught Hay some important lessons.

All three were males, and Hay, founder and chief executive of Vienna-based Lanmark Technology, says she’s discovering that not every man is comfortable working with not one but two alpha female ex-military executives.

“I don’t want to let anyone in the corporate culture who’s going to disrupt the culture and isn’t a good fit,” said Hay. “The CEO is really the person who owns the culture of the company … and hires people that reflect what I want in the culture.”

Like many employers grappling with a hire that didn’t go as planned, Hay is taking a step back and trying to figure out what the firm could have done different.

Each of the three men hired as a No. 2 had all the technical expertise required, and the first one came highly recommended by the man who left the job, Hay said. Yet none were comfortable in Lanmark’s “dynamic and fast-paced” culture, as Hay describes it, which is a mix of military rigor and her friendly, open attitude and competitive spirit.

“Fast and dynamic are relative terms, so until someone can get a true understanding of what [Lanmark] considers to be fast paced and dynamic, it’s only their own previous experiences that they’re basing their understanding on when they say they work well in that type of environment,” Hay said. “Too many balls get dropped if you can’t keep up, and I’m trying to assemble a team of committed professionals to catapult [the company] to the next level.”

Much of Lanmark’s hiring comes through military transition assistance programs, or TAPs, though earlier this year, the company also started using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to locate and recruit people. Approximately 85 percent of Lanmark’s 200 staffers have military backgrounds — either they served a tour of duty or they worked for the Defense Department or one of its agencies. About 57 percent are male.

Hay worked as a naval intelligence officer, and retired Col. Laurie Buckhout came on board in August 2010 as vice president.

Hay, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants in suburban Virginia, said she grew up believing women could do anything. “I didn’t even realize there were barriers to women,” she said, until she learned she couldn’t join the Navy’s Blue Angels because women were still excluded from combat roles.

“I used to approach these obstacles with a full frontal attack. I learned that is not necessarily the smartest way,” she said, noting she still keeps the book “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu on her nightstand as a reminder of how to tackle issues strategically and tactically.