V2X emerged as a new government services provider in the summer of 2022 after a merger between Vectrus and Vertex. Now, V2X is looking toward the future with a focus on expanding into new areas and strengthening its presence in its existing markets and capability areas.
Executive Mosaic sat down with V2X Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President Shawn Mural to talk about his new role, the company’s trajectory and what we can expect to see from V2X in 2024. Read below for Mural’s full Executive Spotlight interview.
To set the scene for our conversation, can you give us your overview of the current GovCon market? What trends and factors are shaping the financial landscape?
It’s a competitive market space. We see lots of opportunities, but we also see a lot of competition to provide services. We participate in the operational segment of the broader federal services marketplace, and those services and capabilities are highly sought after and required, especially when you think about current events around the globe.
Financially speaking, we’re seeing growth across the sector. At V2X, we’re focused on delivering and developing the value to our clients and our customers that distinguishes us from competitors, and we’re remaining very focused on that value proposition.
Shawn, you joined V2X as SVP and CFO in October of last year. What attracted you to V2X?
I spent the better part of my career at another firm, and some of that time was in the federal services business. I greatly appreciated the intimacy with the clients and the ability to really impact outcomes for those customers. I’m most grateful for those opportunities. But I saw joining V2X as a way of getting to some of the stuff that I enjoyed from my previous experiences and working in a slightly different capacity.
As with any business, the thing that attracts you to the company is the people. Here at V2X, we have wonderful people that are always working to enhance our client’s experience and deliver additional value. In meetings with the folks here, that’s what I saw, and I felt that I wanted to be a part of that. So that’s why I’m here.
What do you hope to accomplish in your new role?
V2X as it exists today has only been around a couple of years, although our legacy goes back decades. Two companies came together to form this business, and there are still some ongoing integration activities as we mature processes and procedures. I think the teams here have done a wonderful job of positioning the company, and they’ve made some very hard decisions early on in the lifecycle of the business. Looking forward, we’ve got other things to do, and we’re going to continue to build on those things.
An important element for us is demonstrated, predictable performance, both for our customers and for our shareholders. Additionally, people are critical in our business, and I want to actively participate in developing talent across the enterprise. As I said before, the thing that makes being in this business special is the people.
And finally, we need to enhance customer intimacy around the globe as opportunities develop, and I’d like to have customers look at us perhaps a little bit differently from a capability standpoint. We’re known for certain things, but we need to grow our presence in the modernization and sustainment areas of the business. We have some manufacturing and engineering development capabilities with introductions of technologies that folks don’t necessarily associate with us today. But we certainly have those capabilities and we want to show it.
Can you share some of those technologies that people may not associate with V2X, but that you would like to have a bigger presence in?
Our customers are always challenged with extending the life and capabilities of platforms and systems. We have a wonderful engineering capability that we think can reimagine the repurposing of assets. We’ve demonstrated it with certain customers, though we can’t talk about it a lot because we do play in some classified spaces — something else that folks might not know about us.
Delivering that capability perhaps more broadly is something that I’m very excited about. We have a 1 million-square-foot facility in Indianapolis with 400-500 engineers. I’m very excited about the opportunities that the talent can bring to providing solutions for life extension of assets, repurposing of equipment and reimagining how it could be used for either short or long duration missions that those customers might have.
Then from a geographic standpoint, we’re around the globe with heavy concentrations in the Middle East and in the Pacific. Delivering value to the footprint that we already have for our customers is also important, and I see opportunities here for us with technology. We’ve demonstrated some success, and we’d like to continue to do those things and build on it around the globe to support our customers.
What can you tell me about V2X’s growth strategy? How are the GovCon industry trends we talked about previously are influencing this strategy as you look toward V2X’s future?
We have a very strong pipeline. When we look at the growth prospects, we’ve got to stay true to who we are and make sure that we’re not trying to do too many things too fast. We want to stay true to our core and have predictable growth. The things that you can count on from us are to be there to deliver on our commitments and our mission and to continue to support our customers.
There are plenty of opportunities for us to go compete in, and we will work probably in the near term to help focus on some technology insertion areas. We’ll be selective about those activities. No one has infinite resources, so how you deploy those resources has a significant impact on the growth trajectories of the business and those prospects.
We’re going through our process of doing those things for 2024. We strategized in the back part of 2023 and we’re planning to launch those things here in 2024. The team is convening in various places right now to help roll those out to our engineers and other teams that are going to help develop those things and propel us forward. We feel very good about our growth prospects.
We’ll be showing up in places that people might not associate with us right now and really leveraging these two companies as they have come together. When you think about the whole life cycle that this business supports — the MRO side of the business that we’ve had with aircraft, the modernization and sustainment, as well as some technology insertion — we really participate in the full cycle of programs. We’re looking at how we can do that both for our end customers as well as maybe some of the other primes.
