Today, I am going to talk about “amiability” (aka being friendly).

(Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 31 seconds)

According to Bo Jaquess (current SEAOSD president), “amiability” is number two on the list of “what it takes to excel as an engineer.” (link)

(Which by the way, I talked about #1 here).

Bo says:

“For better or worse, you must work with other people.
The architects, contractors, MEP engineers, welders, and rodbusters are working toward the same goal as you are: a successful project.

And all are under pressure of some kind, just like you are.

Being ‘a pleasure to work with' can be a real factor in your firm landing the next job with that client, as well as your upward mobility within your own firm. Aside from the fact it's just the decent thing to do.”

– Bo Jaquess

Totally agree. Going to riff off on this and add a few of my takes.

To me, being a decent human/engineer also means that:

1/ You are not a jerk

2/ You are not prideful

3/ You don't react to sh*t immediately

Let me elaborate.

— Side note —

By the way, this is a rehash of an article I wrote in my weekly newsletter, “Back of the Envelope” — where I teach you SE-related things in 5 minutes (or less), once a week.

If you enjoyed reading it, consider subscribing at the end of the post to be one of the first to get new emails every Thursday (which I eventually rehash onto LinkedIn a couple of weeks later).

— End side note —

First: You are not a jerk

This is obvious, and most engineers I know are pretty friendly and polite (most of the time).

But the test of character really happens when you are under a lot of stress.

You know, at times when you have deadlines after deadlines, and you haven't slept well in days.

That's when you really got to watch out.

Pay attention to how you react to clients when they call. And pay attention to how you respond to emails.

Do you sense animosity and anger in yourself?

If so, time to step back and pause before you press send (I've done that a few times myself).

You just prevented yourself from becoming a jerk.

2nd: Don't be prideful

Now, this is more common among engineers.

What is prideful?

It means that you think you are better than another person.

“But that contractor just doesn't get it! He butchered my beam and is now asking for help after the fact!”

Yeah I know. I've been there…

But nobody knows everything, so that guy probably knows something that I don't.

If you catch yourself thinking like Scar, maybe it's time to pause and re-evaluate.

Third: Don't react to sh*t

Every day, there will be things that annoy you.

Plan checkers will say that your design is not safe (it is) and does not meet code (it does).

Cost estimators will accuse you of increasing the structural cost between DD and CD.

Architects will ask for your drawings two days before it's actually due.

(These may or may not be based on personal experience )

Whatever it is, sometimes you may feel the need to “react” immediately.

Perhaps fire back with an angry-ish email defending yourself?

Or perhaps in your mind, you pictured yourself as Will Smith (and the person that made you upset is Chris Rock)?

Now before you do anything, just remember this quote from the man on your hundred-dollar bill:

“Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.”Benjamin Franklin

(sorry Agent J) 

Again, take a step back, take a walk, take a deep breath, then come back to the situation to see if you feel any differently.

By not cascading the negativity downstream, you might have just made the world a better place (at least a little bit).

And that is part of being amiable.

That is all for now. I know this stuff is not exactly engineering, but it is important to talk about.

Hope you liked it.

If you enjoyed reading this, check out the rest of my articles on Back of the Envelope and subscribe maybe?

And be sure to leave a reply to let me know what you think!

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If you enjoyed reading it, subscribe at the end of the post to be one of the first to get new emails (every Thursday).

Today, I will talk about a webcast that happened in March called “For the Betterment of the Structural Engineering Profession.”

I’ll give you a brief overview of what went down and tell you my take.

Let’s dive in.

(Estimated read time: 3 minutes and 52 seconds)

The “Vision”

So the good people at CASE, NCESEA, and SEI did an hour-long virtual “town hall meeting” to update us on their vision of the profession and what they are doing to get there.

(Don’t know the acronyms? Don’t feel bad; me neither. ‘S’ stands for structural.)

The official “vision” can be viewed here if you are interested (second page). There are quite a few big words in there (which I am sure they’ve put a lot of thought into), but that also means it takes quite a bit of effort to digest.

To save you some time, this is my shortened version of the vision:

(Really, I think that's what they are trying to say.)

“Key Initiatives”

Now, with that vision, they came up with ten key initiatives. It’s mostly stuff you’ve heard people talking about, like developing leaders, advancing the profession, encouraging resilience, improving mentoring, etc. (you can read the full list here).

They showed the result of a poll they did recently to see which one people cared about the most (I took a screenshot):

The webcast then went over each one, and the panelist talked about what they are doing for each initiative.

It would be nice if they put that down on a website somewhere, but from what I can remember, a lot of it is “we’ve set up committees who have many things down in the pipeline…etc.” (Sorry I am probably not doing them justice here.)

The last part of the session was a round of Q&As which was interesting.

Someone on Reddit (“ma_clare”) copied down the questions being asked (you can read them here) — my impression was that the answers to these questions were pretty general (e.g., “yes we are doing several things related to that” or “the best way for you to help is to get involved”) which are really not that helpful.

All in all, it was an interesting meeting but definitely left a lot to be desired.

My Take

Alright now let me tell you what I think.

First of all, props to these guys for putting it together; you can tell that they’ve spent a lot of time genuinely trying to improve the profession.

However, I see a few potential issues with the way this is approached:

1. It might be a bit too corporate-ish.

Not sure how to describe this but it feels a lot like a politician telling people, “yes we have committees and initiatives to help us reach our goal.” Basically, a lot of words but not really saying a whole lot. I think some specific milestones or roadmaps could help.

2. Too ambitious

The ex-COO/CFO of Instacart, Ravi Gupta, once said this:

My advice to people when they are thinking about instituting a new process is to go to a whiteboard and write down the answer to this question: “If you could only get one thing done this year, what would it be?”. 

If that answer is “institute some new process”, go for it. But if it’s something like “increase market share from 30% to 60%” or “launch this new product that will 2x our TAM”, don’t waste your time on anything else. Just take your best person (up to and including the CEO), make them responsible for solving that problem, and give them everything and everyone they need to make it happen.” 

In other words, everyone should concentrate on one singular focus rather than diverting resources to 10 different things.

Kind of like drawing vectors – 10 vectors going in the same direction get you a lot farther than having arrows going in all directions.

3. They either missed, or purposely avoided talking about “money”?

It is true that many are in this profession because they love the challenge and the work. But if the money can’t keep up, we will have problems keeping and attracting talents down the road (or even now).

In fact, more money also means more resources for the “key initiatives” and which can get us closer to the “vision.”

But how? I have several ideas — we'll save that for another day.

And that’s all for now – thanks for reading!

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

The post Recap: Town hall meetings for structural engineers appeared first on Structural Engineer HQ.

What Is This About?

So I decided to change it up a little and write about some of my other passions:

…business, sales, and marketing of engineering firms.

Whether you are an owner/part-owner/employee of a firm, this is something that you’ll find applicable because knowing how to market and sell your engineering service is absolutely crucial for the survival and growth of your business/career.

In fact, I believe that being good at engineering is only half of the equation of becoming an extraordinary engineer.

The other half, is knowing how to communicate to others (i.e. your clients) the value of your services.

We’ll get more into that later down the road but to start off, I am going to talk about something called the “Geometric Growth”.

What is Geometric Growth?

“Geometric growth” essentially means “exponential growth” —  it’s a term coined by the legendary marketing and business strategist named Jay Abraham.

Who is Jay Abraham

I won’t go into too much detail about Jay here since I won’t be able to do him justice by just writing a simple introduction — instead, I’ll just quote an excerpt from his bio [link]:

Jay has spent his entire career solving problems and fixing businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries, and over 7,200 sub industries, worldwide.

Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business. He has studied, and solved, almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity.

Jay has an uncanny ability to increase business income, wealth and success. He uncovers hidden assets, overlooked opportunities and undervalued possibilities. This skill set has captured the attention and respect of CEOs, best-selling authors, entrepreneurs and marketing experts.

Jay’s clients range from business royalty to small business owners. But they all have one thing in common – virtually all of them have profited greatly from Jay’s expertise. Many clients acknowledge that Jay’s efforts and ideas have lead to millions of dollars of profit increase.

Alright, the point is that he knows his stuff very well — and there is a good chance that if we apply his strategies to our industry, we’ll be able to make the structural engineering profession more fun and more profitable.

Number of Ways To Grow a Business

Now, to elaborate on “Geometric Growth” (i.e. exponential growth), let me first ask you, “How many different ways do you think are there to grow a structural engineering business?”

Whether you are the owner/principals of a firm or an employee, this is something that you should think about on a periodic basis.

Because growth = more profit = more income = higher quality of service and higher quality of life.

Most people think there are countless ways to grow a business and tend to think in terms of “tactics” (For example: introducing yourself to new contacts via networking events; asking or “hoping” for referrals; distributing business cards or brochures; cold calling potential prospects; increasing your rate; reaching out to your existing clients on a weekly basis…etc).

Well, Jay was able to narrow all of these things down to just three fundamentals of growing a company. And those are:

1. Increase the number of clients
2. Increase the frequency that each client buys from you
3. Increase the revenue per project with a client

You can essentially categorize each of the “tactics” into these three fundamentals.

Yes it seems kind of simple and that’s the beauty of it.

As you will see shortly, if you focus on all three consistently, you will be able to achieve “geometric growth” and will be able to grow exponentially rather than linearly.

So rather than arbitrary trying various “tactics”, you strategically implement your ideas based on the three fundamentals.

Let me show you what this means with some simple math.

Example of Geometric Growth

Say that you are a small-medium firm with a couple of employees and are doing about a million dollars in annual revenue ($1,000,000/year).

We’ll assume that you have about 10 clients who use your services regularly — perhaps 4 projects a year per client — and you generate on average, around $25k per project.

So [10 clients] x [4 projects/year] x [$25 k] = $1 million/year.

Scenario 1: Increase Everything by 10%

Now, if you can…

1. Grow your client base by 10% (10 x 1.1 = 11 clients)
2. Increase the number of times each client uses your service by 10% (4 x 1.1 = ~4.4 projects per year)
3. Increase the revenue generated per project by 10% ($25 k x 1.1 = $27.5 k)

With that, your new revenue is now [11 x 4.4 x 27.5] = $1.33 million/year.

In other words, by focusing on growing each area by just 10%, your business can grow by 33% overall.

Scenario 2: Increase Everything by 30%

And what if you can improve each area by 30% instead?

1. Grow your client base by 30% (10 x 1.1 = 13 clients)
2. Increase the number of times each client uses your service by 30% (4 x 1.3 = ~5.2 projects per year)
3. Increase the revenue generated per project by 30% ($25 k x 1.3 = $32.5 k)

You now have [13 x 5.2 x 32.5] = $2.2 million/year — which means that by growing each area by 30%, you can essentially more than double your business!

Implications

Yes I know this example is oversimplified… (e.g. some of your larger clients are likely to bring in 10x or 100x the revenue of your smaller clients) — but I hope you see that the same concept still applies.

So instead of asking yourself: “How can I double my business in the next X years?”

You can now ask the right questions:

• …“What can I do to grow my client base by 30%?”
• …“What can I do to get my existing clients to use me more often?”
• …“What can I do to increase my fees on each project?”

We'll tackle these one-by-one in the future but for now, you should see that just by focusing on the three fundamentals, you will be able to strategically grow you business instead of aimlessly applying various tactics and always chasing your tails.

Action Steps (If You Are an Owner/Co-Owner/Principal…etc)

Alright, so if you are the owner or one of the co-owners of a firm, first thing you should do is to figure out where your business stands right now.

By that I mean you should have the answers to these questions:

• How many clients have used your engineering services in the past 12 months?
• On average, how often do they use your service?
• What is your average fee per project?

Do it on paper or spreadsheet and get a really good grasp about where your business stands.

And once you know where your business is at, think about where you want it to be and in what time frame (e.g. $5 million annual revenue in 10 years…etc.).

When you have the information down, you can then sit down and brainstorm on what you can do to grow your business by improving each of the three fundamentals.

Action Steps (If You Are an Employee or If You Are “Thinking About Starting Your Own Business”)

Now, if you are working for someone else, you most likely won’t have access to all of the data like “past/current clients”, “revenue per projects”…etc.

That’s fine but you should realize that the company’s bottom line and its growth will directly affect your career and job security.

And for that reason, it is in your best interest to always think about how you can help improving the company. And one way to do that, is to simply be constantly observant.

For example,

…If the company is growing, do you know what it’s doing right?

…If it’s not, do you know why not?

Also observe other companies (e.g. competitors in engineering or companies in totally different industries) and see what you like about what they are doing.

Take notes about what you observe and think about how everything ties into the 3 fundamentals.

Then, you can come up with ideas about how you can help your company in areas other than the “technicals”. Once you refine your ideas over time, you can bring them up to the upper managements and offer to help them implement or test the ideas.

And if you ever thought about starting your own firm one day, these notes and ideas will also help you start and grow on the right track when you finally open for business.

Your Thoughts?

To sum up, there are 3 fundamentals ways to grow a structural engineering business:

1. Increase the number of clients
2. Increase the frequency that each client buys from you
3. Increase the revenue per project with a client

If you focus on making incremental improvements to each of the fundamentals…

…instead of growing your company linearly (or worse, staying stagnant), your company will be able to grow exponentially — aka achieving a sustainable geometric growth.

Make sense?

Now your turn.

What are some things you have done for your firm (or the company you work for) that can be categorized into one of the fundamentals?

Let me know in the comments below.

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