January 14, 2025 • 51 mins
Tyler Sease discusses his background in structural engineering and the niche of Southern Steel Engineers, exploring the impact of large corporations on its culture and operations. He shares insights on balancing roles in different business cultures, hiring practices, team building, and ensuring safety and accuracy in engineering amidst growth. The episode covers strategic hiring, process evaluation, growth planning, and role redundancy. Tyler highlights training and retention strategies, managing people and processes, and documentation methods. He also addresses remote work dynamics, team communication, assessing new hires, and sustainable growth, offering leadership advice and closing thoughts.
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(00:00):
I think most owners and founders would love ifthat was the case for them.
(00:04):
So, no, that that's awesome.
That's probably a piece of why you've been ableto grow a 108%.
So Sure.
Explain explain to us all the strategies there.
What like, how did how did that occur?
Obviously, being part of the Inc.
5000, super cool, but the growth, is really thesuper exciting part.
Have you ever wondered how successfularchitecture, engineering, and construction
(00:27):
companies scale their business?
Or have you ever wanted guidance on how to getmore growth, wealth, and freedom from your AEC
company?
Well, then you are in luck.
Hi.
I'm Will Forat.
And I'm Justin Nagel, and we're your podcasthosts.
We interview successful AEC business leaders tolearn how they use people, process, and
(00:47):
technology to scale their businesses.
So sit back and get ready to learn from theindustry's best.
This is
building scale.
Hey, listeners.
It's Will here.
Our mission is to help the AC industry protectitself by making technology easy.
If you've ever listened to our show, then youknow that the 3 pillars of scaling a business
(01:10):
are people, process, and technology.
So if you suspect technology is your weak link,then book a call with us to see where we can
help maximize your company's IP cybersecuritystrategy.
Just go to building scale dot net slash health.
Today's guest is the founder of Southern SteelEngineers or SSE, Eiler Sees.
(01:33):
SSE is a structural engineering firmspecializing in delegated steel design,
including connection design, shop drawingreviews, and erection engineering.
Tyler Sees is a licensed professional engineer,a structural engineer, and a certified welding
inspector with over 15 years of experience instructural engineering and steel construction.
They hold engineering licenses from 46 states,bringing a nationwide perspective to steel
(01:57):
design and construction.
Under his leadership, SSE has earnedrecognition as best firm to work for by his Y
Group in 2024 and is featured on the Inc 51,000 list for its a 108% growth rate.
Tyler leads team of 13, delivering innovativeand cost effective steel solutions while
fostering an award winning company culture.
(02:18):
And with all that said, Tyler, welcome to theshow.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate you having me on.
Yeah.
As we said before, I don't have a whiteboardanymore.
I moved I moved I moved, places.
So I don't want the Totally different.
People that view the podcast on Spotify orYouTube or wherever, they're they don't get
alarmed that I'm I'm somewhere else.
(02:39):
So, yes.
But I said a bunch of nice stuff, Tyler, buttell us the the true story.
How did you get into, the space and, tell usabout SSE.
Yeah.
So I guess,
I kind of got led into steel.
My father had a steel detailing business.
So I started working with him when I was ateenager, came to work with him in the summers
before I could drive or anything startedlearning steel and always liked math and
(03:03):
science.
So went into engineering and with the steelbackground kind of geared towards structural
engineering.
And after college started with a steelfabricator doing structural engineering for all
sorts of steel projects.
And one thing led to another and eventually,2017, started SSE.
And we've just been building scale since thenand just, just growing.
(03:27):
And, Yeah, that's kind of the gist of it.
Got it.
So you are very niched in compared, sent to,like a steel erector or something like that.
Explain that a little bit for listeners so theyhave a good understanding.
So we're a niche firm.
So most structural engineering firms workprimarily for architects, whereas we work
primarily for steel fabricators, steeldetailers, or steel erectors.
(03:52):
And then while it, typical structuralengineering firm will work in all different
building materials, steel, concrete, wood,light gauge, masonry.
We're really focused on steel.
By being niche, it allows us to specialize insteel and really develop a level of expertise
(04:13):
where we can really serve our clients reallywell.
So that's what we're specialized in and that'swhat we do.
So tell us a little bit about your background,right?
Cause, you were not, you know, you weren'talways in here.
You were in a very, very large company.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that andthen what translates?
(04:37):
Yeah.
So I started out working for, a large fortune500 company.
So we were a structural engineering departmentwithin, CMC and commercial metals.
So we worked for the steel fabricators.
So it was kind of a little bit of a hybridbecause our group was 10 to 12 engineers, but
(04:59):
we're part of a massive company.
So I got to see kind of some of the benefits oflarge corporate structures and some of the kind
of downsides of, of large corporate structures.
And so when I started SSE, we tried to reallyemphasize building out a strong benefits
(05:20):
program.
I mean, initially we didn't have that, but thatthe goal was to build it up.
And we did that.
And then a lot of organization within ourcompany.
But then on the other side, moving away fromthe corporate structure, really wanted to put
an emphasis on a team approach from thestandpoint of being able to have a pretty flat
organization where we can make decisionsquickly.
(05:43):
Large corporate structures just lend themselvesto layers of hierarchy, and rightfully so
that's how it works, but we're able to be verynimble and make decisions quickly, make
judgment calls, which is nice.
So if recently we had an employee whosedaughter was in the hospital for a few weeks
and we're able to make an exception and letthem handle that and not have any repercussions
(06:10):
here or, or we're able to pay them for thattime and let them handle that on a personal
side.
So those are things that as a small business,we're able to do that maybe large businesses
aren't able to accommodate.
So.
A difference in cultures, small businesscompared to large.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very every, I mean, and we'restill a small business.
(06:32):
We've grown a lot, but we're at 13 people now,but everybody knows everybody.
We've got a very team oriented approach andable to be very collaborative across the whole
company.
So what, what doesn't work?
What doesn't translate from, I mean, they're afortune 500 company.
What doesn't translate?
Because I mean, they've scaled right.
(06:52):
Fortune 500, you have to have scaled.
So what does something, some things don'ttranslate or don't work well on the smaller
business side.
What have you seen that doesn't work well?
I mean, I guess one thing would be that we haveto wear a lot of hats.
We don't have departments.
We don't have an HR department.
We don't have an IT department.
We're especially early on, I was having to do alittle bit of everything.
(07:16):
As we've scaled up, we've added, our officemanager now helps with a variety of areas.
But we don't have a full dedicated team for anyof the business departments of the, of the
company, if that makes sense.
So if it's accounting or HR it, we've kindagotta be able to jump in and help where needed
and figure things out and be very flexible.
(07:39):
So, whereas with a large corporate structure,you've got a lot of silos of, different areas
that people stay focused in.
We've we're spread out more in different areas.
I guess this kind of really translates totalking about people managing people then
doesn't it?
(08:00):
Because it looks a little different, wearingmultiple hats and whatnot.
Which means that hiring people isn't just abouthiring, you know, isn't specific to exactly one
job?
This is your, this is your cog.
This is your job.
And then that's it.
Right.
There's, there's obviously a lot more to it.
(08:21):
Tell us a little bit about, we'll say yourlearning lessons in hiring, you know, hiring
your people.
Yeah.
So as we've grown, we've been able to get alittle bit more compartmentalized with certain
positions to where they're more down to theirjob responsibilities.
Like early on myself and our VP, we werewearing all the hats, doing a little bit of
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everything.
In terms of hiring, some of it, I don't know ifwe've done a good job or we've just gotten
lucky, but we've got a really great team atleast.
We've not had an issue with turnover and we puta lot of work into trying to hire the right
people.
Sometimes it's hard to even know until youactually get somebody on board and start work,
start working with them, but you make the bestdecisions you can based on the information you
(09:07):
have.
And one thing that we implemented probably 5years ago or so was an assessment that we use.
And it measures a variety of personalitytraits, but also cognitive traits.
So we're able to get some information toobjectively compare candidates and make sure
they fit in with our team and also make sure,like one of the aspects of our, assessment is,
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mini visualization, spatial visualization.
So it's got all these different cubes andgeometric shapes and shows different rotations.
And then you have to be able to look at it andtell if they're the same shape or not, just
rotate it.
And that's something that we've had PhDcandidates that completely had, I mean, didn't
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get any of those right.
And then we've had other people like maybe foran office manager role that they can see that
stuff.
So a large part of what we do is seeing thingsin 3 d, looking at 3 d models, looking at
drawings and being able to visualize in 3 d.
So that's just a small part of what we do tokind of make sure we're getting the right
(10:16):
people.
That's on the cognitive side.
And that's a skill that I'm not sure how muchof that is purely natural and how much can be
learned.
But I think that's something that, I mean,you're not learning that in school was kind of
an enlarged part.
I think most people can either kind of do thator not.
So that's part of it, but other parts are likeliking a structured environment.
(10:37):
So if we are looking to hiring an engineer,engineers have to be very regimented.
We have to follow codes.
We have to provide calculations.
We have to do things in a consistent,methodical approach.
If someone comes up on the assessment is likinga very flexible workspace where they can kind
of do things their own way, that's probably notthe right fit for what we're looking for.
(11:00):
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's other positions that's good for.
But from an engineering standpoint, thatwouldn't be a good fit.
Because that really then brings liability to,to the company.
Right.
Yeah.
The opposite effect is, if you're notregimented, miss misstep, skip a step, either
(11:21):
something happens with the building falls apartor someone gets hurt.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's something we have to alwayskeep in mind is what we're doing is really
important.
We can't afford mistakes because it's not justmoney involved.
If a structure fails, I mean, there could beloss of life and that's the last thing we ever
want to have to deal with.
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And so we, we have to maintain a very highlevel of accuracy and, know that we can trust
our team.
How are you able to be still structured withsuch a high growth rate?
Right?
Obviously, we've seen this at Spot.
When you grow significantly Yeah.
It it creates problems operationally.
Right?
Like, it just that's inherently what happens.
(12:02):
So you guys grew a ton.
So, how were you able to stay on top of that?
There's been some challenges.
Part of it is from the beginning, we've triedto, even when we were 2 or 3 people, we tried
to think long term and put together processesof how we were going to do things to help keep
us consistent and give us an approach thatpeople could follow.
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And we've, we've had to work through that and,and really put effort into improving our
processes along the way and making them morerepeatable.
And then we're working on, we're still workingthrough now really documenting that even
better.
Because for a while we were adding 1 employee ayear and then, since 22, it's been 2 or 3 a
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year.
So, I guess at times there's been a lot on ourmanagers to project managers to really stay on
top of new hires and, get them to a point wherethey either know what to do, or they understand
their limitations and know when to askquestions and get help.
That's a big thing too.
(13:09):
Are you hiring before the the need or hiringGrant?
Perfect.
We
all should
have hired 3, 6 months ago, because I assumethat what you do is is fairly technical.
So either you're hiring somebody that's superveteran or you're hiring somebody that needs a
lot of training.
(13:29):
Right?
So explain this actually share your kind ofhiring philosophy in that regard, what it looks
like.
Yeah.
We've tried to stay in front of
it as much as we could.
That's been difficult at times because some ofour largest clients, they've gone through huge
growth rates as well.
So it's been hard to keep up at times withtheir demand.
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But yeah, we've tried to stay in front of itand we've tried to identify which areas of the
business we needed help in next.
So like I guess in 22, we hired an estimatorfor the first time.
Before that our engineers were doing all of ourestimating for new projects.
So that was something that helped buildcapacity by getting some of that work to
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someone who could focus on estimating.
And then just this year, we hired someone tohelp out with shop drawing reviews.
So it's a steel detailer with 30 years ofexperience and he's been a big help to our team
and given us the ability to, have ourengineering team have more help on different
aspects of the project.
And, that has helped lead to growth as well,because while we didn't add engineering
(14:37):
capacity with that role, we were able to freeup more engineering time with that role.
So you're essentially looking at the services,how much time is spent on the actual service.
Some companies call billable hours.
Right?
But then this is us.
This is in our world.
We call this soft cost, right?
(14:57):
What is, what is killing you death by a 1,000paper cuts or otherwise, these are soft costs
that don't show up on the P and L.
They don't show up.
You know, the only indicators that you have issort of the, whatever metrics you have for
productivity, but even that's hard to measure,but knowing that you've hold some of that,
(15:18):
those job functions off of either a group ofpeople or everyone, everyone's sort of
responsible, but no one's actually responsible
for
some of those internal components.
Right.
So if
you pull, pull it off of, let's say, you know,3, 5 people every single one of them has now
gotten a little bit more time to work on.
We'll call it the billable hour versus versuswhat's not billable, but still important
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because it, then this is, you can't operate ifyou don't do the internal stuff.
That's right.
Yeah.
And our office managers helped out a lot too,in different processes.
Like when we get an updated drawings onprojects, kind of having a standardized way of
doing that and taking more workload off of ourengineering team.
Because our engineering team has been at maxcapacity for several years now.
(16:07):
We've kind of just constantly doing our best tokeep up from a growth standpoint.
So it's been, we've grown a lot outside of ourengineering roles in the past 2 years.
We've added engineers too, but we've reallymade the jump from having just engineers to
having more positions that are able to help ourbusiness overall.
(16:29):
Doctor.
Supporting roles, for the engineers.
You know, if you look at pretty much the entireindustry, hard tactical engineering, it's
really, they're all, it's all serviced.
Yes.
There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot ofhardware, if you will.
There's a lot of hard components to them, wood,steel, etcetera.
(16:49):
Right.
These are your, this is your cost of goods soldfor creating the structures, but then the
people side, this is your, this is where youhave the ability to manage it better.
Right?
So you said max capacity, but your max capacityfor your engineers changed even by pulling,
let's say, some of the, some of the stuffthat's not directly billable.
(17:11):
That's one way to change the max capacity ofyour engineers.
Right.
So all of
a sudden,
and so yes, they've been working full time.
They've been working potentially even overtime, but now the capacity is even higher
because they pulled up just that soft cost oftime considering into
it.
That's right.
Yeah.
And that was something we looked at.
We do annual strategic planning each year inJanuary, and that was something we looked at
(17:35):
last year.
I was looking at our projected engineeringhours and kind of our revenue goals and, looked
at the fact that if we hired someone to helpout with shop drawing review, how much that
would help free up engineering hours?
Because they can't, we have more shop drawingreview than one person can handle, but that
really frees up a lot of time for engineeringteam and really adds to our capacity and
(17:58):
ability to drive more revenue growth.
So how do you evaluate, let's say the as youwere doing it strategically, how do you
evaluate that?
Or how do you figure out that, oh, this is,this is time spent that should be offloaded to
someone else.
Yeah.
So some of it is looking at the, so we trackour time in a different way than a lot of
(18:21):
firms.
We're not looking at, so we don't do timesheets in a traditional traditional sense.
But we track time on projects to make surewe're staying on budget.
But people are spending time on developmentitems or, professional development.
We're not, we're not worried about our team notcarrying their weight and working hard.
So we're not fracking that stuff.
But so each year I look at how much time spentin our different service areas.
(18:43):
And then we look at projected needs for thefollowing year and try to determine where we
could use help and whether that's someone inconnection design, an engineer for connection
design or engineer for miscellaneous design orshop drive view, or maybe our engineers are
spending too much time on estimating.
We're trying to identify where we could usepeople to help us continue to grow and not get
(19:08):
bottlenecked.
And that's something that we've dealt with.
When you're a small firm and 2 people are onvacation at the same time, it's a disaster.
So we, that's something that we've tried togrow as we've grown, we're trying to make sure
we have redundant redundant, personnel.
Well, not personnel, but from the standpoint ofwe have an option, a backup option for each
(19:30):
important function in the business.
So that if, if somebody in estimating is out onvacation, we've got someone else to cover.
If somebody in connection design is onvacation, we've got somebody to cover and
growing that makes us more resilient becausewe're not so it still matters anytime somebody
with, when you're 13 people, one person's onvacation for a week, it still makes an impact,
(19:53):
but we're able to better work around that nowthan we were in the past.
And then from a projection standpoint, likeback to strategic planning, one thing we look
at is our revenue per employee or revenue perengineer.
And we're able to kind of make pretty goodguesses at what our revenue targets are for the
(20:16):
following year based on those numbers.
Because we've got a lot of good data now.
We actually couple of years ago, I got reallylucky and got within 1% of, what our, who ended
up being.
That was more luck than still.
But yeah,
it's pretty, right.
At least twice a day, right?
That's right.
So, but it's, it's a pretty good guess at wherewe're gonna fall and kind of what, what revenue
(20:42):
range we can get to with a certain amount oftrained people.
But that's the big thing.
You gotta have people that are trained well andunderstand what they're doing and can deliver
at a high level.
So let's talk about that for a second, youknow, training.
How long
does it take to get someone that's nearly hiredto the point where they're able to start
(21:03):
producing?
They might not be effectively producing, butlet's just get them to producing and then
further that to effectively producing.
It varies a little bit.
So we've hired now probably I think 5 engineersright out of college.
And we've got a track record now of kind ofknowing how to train those engineers up because
(21:26):
I tell people sometimes in interviews and theydon't like it, but I was like, you've learned
probably 10% of what you need to know when inwith your bachelor's degree.
There's a lot you have to learn outside ofschool.
But I would say in general, the 1st 3 to 4months are pretty much a watch.
There's not gonna be a lot of production there.
(21:47):
It's, we're expecting the 1st 3 to 4 months arelargely training and we'll get them involved on
projects and working on things once they startgetting a feel, but it's not very productive.
And, that's fine as part of the process.
And we're expecting that.
And usually by the time they hit 6 months,they're starting to starting to help out more.
(22:12):
And by year, usually people are in a, we've gotthem to the spot that they're pretty
productive.
They're not fully trained yet.
They don't know everything.
And really in this business, you never knoweverything.
It's always, there's always something to learn.
But, the 1st 3 to 4 months, we're not gettingmuch production at all out of new hires.
It, it, it takes some time.
(22:33):
So in other words, losing revenue on them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we were to hire somebody an engineerright out of college and they stuck around 6
months and left, that really wouldn't be goodfor us.
So then how do you make sure that they do staylonger than 6 months?
Well, fortunately, every engineer we've hiredis still with us.
(22:53):
We've, we've done a good job of, like I said,with hiring, we've either done a good job or
we've gotten really lucky because we've madegood hires.
And I think part of it is we don't putunrealistic expectations on them initially from
a training standpoint or knowledge standpoint.
We expect them to not be productive the 1st 3months.
And we'll explain to them like, now's the time,ask all the questions.
(23:15):
Like, don't worry about whether you think it'sa dumb question, like ask all your questions.
And our team is very collaborative and, we arein office.
So that helps a lot with training, I think, anddoing that in person and working, we try to be
patient with people early on and really focuson the fundamentals and teaching them the
(23:36):
background in the business and the engineeringof what we do.
And I think that has helped a lot in retention.
And then aside from the training, it's goodbenefits and a supportive team approach, and
things like that, that help as well.
How do you manage effectively?
Like did you manage prior?
And then if you did, what, what did you learnfrom that?
(23:58):
And then if not, how have you discovered yourown path for managing people?
Right.
Obviously you gotta hire the right people.
Right.
That's that's step.
And and look, it sounds like that piece ishappening, but you're also, they're sticking
around.
Right.
So like inherently, you're you must be doing atleast something pretty well.
Yeah.
So the answer to that is no.
I'd never managed anybody before and it waspurely like trial by fire.
(24:22):
So kind of just figuring it out as we as wewent.
And I mean, I've made mistakes.
I mean, I've had to learn and try to educatemyself on how to manage people and how to,
manage different types of people.
And I'm still trying to get better at that andstill learning because something that works for
one person may not work for another person.
(24:44):
And some people take constructive criticismfine and others take it differently, and you
have to approach it a different way andsomething I'm continuously trying to learn and
get better at as we grow up.
I just had a similar conversation with somebodyabout every person's different.
Right?
Like, every person responds differently, andyour job as the leader is to figure that out.
(25:05):
What is their way that you're gonna then getthe most out of them?
If you if you did everything the same all thetime for everybody, you probably get, you know,
some people will be better, some people be alittle worse, and you might get some form of
consistency.
But if you wanna truly get the most out ofpeople, you gotta understand them and how they
take.
That's right.
Yeah.
And as we added non engineering positions, thatwas
(25:26):
a little
more of a challenge because not all engineersare the same, but in large part, engineers,
engineers are pretty introverted and logicbased and kind of have a lot of similarities.
So as we added people in different roles, wehad more personalities and different types of
people to that I had to learn to help manageand learn how to work efficiently with them.
(25:52):
Not to mention, their definition of fun is alittle different too.
Yeah.
Yes.
Not everybody loves spreadsheets the wayengineers do.
Weird.
Super weird.
What, so what you do is very, very technical,or, you know, very, very similar.
As to you, right, you have to quality thequality of what we do has to to be there.
(26:13):
So do you have full documentation of yourprocesses?
Like, what is what is that look like as you're,one, training people, but then also just for
people to have as a resource as they go?
We're not where we wanna be.
We have some of it documented well, but that'ssomething that we so we set goals each quarter
and each year.
And that's something we wanna hit hard in q oneis working on really tying down our
(26:38):
documentation for some of that, for standardprocedures.
Some of it, the other part of it is, so we havea company intranet that we're building out and
it's within there, we have a knowledge basethat we're working on.
And, so right now we don't have AI in thatsoftware at some point.
We either will, or we'll move to something elsethat people will be able to ask questions to
(27:04):
and ref get more out of that knowledge basequicker.
So that's something that we want to keepbuilding that data so that even if we're not
using it from that standpoint yet, we will atsome point.
And yeah, we're right now.
It's a lot, a lot of things had to be passeddown kind of from engineer to engineer.
If this is how we do things and we're, we'retrying to now really formalize that a lot
(27:28):
better so that people can reference it.
Or when we hire somebody new, they have that tolean on.
Do you feel like everything has to be writtendown or because then maybe I should ask is all
the documentation is it written is in videoformat?
How do you document?
Let's start with that.
Right now it's written or it's, documents or,snapshots or stuff like that.
(27:54):
We haven't gone the video route yet.
Engineers don't like video Sharpie no video.
So our team would not be terribly receptive to,that idea, but so we may consider that in the
future.
Cause I know there's some really good programsout there to help with documenting and
different things like that.
So if it's, so if it's written right, and ittakes, we'll say 4 months or so 3 to 6 months
(28:22):
to get someone to the point of where they'reproductive, honestly efficient, but they're
productive.
Is it at what point do you say, here you go,right?
Do you remove the human interaction side?
So let's say you had everything perfectlydocumented.
Is that even possible to go to essentially say,here you go and go read through this and then
(28:45):
you can start working as soon as you finishreading through that.
Does it work like that?
I think that'd be tough.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it wouldbe tough, but yeah, it could be it could be
done in certain areas.
Because there are some things that are morestraightforward and more consistent project to
project and other things that vary more andtake a lot more experience to see the a 100
(29:07):
different ways something may happen ondifferent types of projects.
But yeah, certain areas I think could be tieddown pretty well.
So this is, in our company, this is the what wecall the difference between science and art of
working on whatever, whatever it is.
Right.
Just like cooking.
There's a recipe, right.
(29:28):
Or there's a, there's a way to go about it.
It's very structured, but then there's the art,which is
in
what order, you do certain things based on theclient or based on the needs, right.
There's the human aspect.
Yeah.
Is the training with the human aspect, becauseI'm assuming that's part of where, where that
(29:52):
really happens.
And engineers, at least my experience withengineers has been because of is that the
communication isn't necessarily taught atschool on how to communicate with, let's say
end clients.
Is that the parts that you're talking about oris there something more?
I would say it's more than that.
The communication with clients doesn't reallyhappen until for us.
(30:13):
We like to wait until engineers have their PEs,their professional engineering license before
we have them dealing with clients a whole lot.
So that gets them 3 to 4 years of experienceand, more experience in the field and knowledge
before they're to that point.
But yeah, that that's a big thing because a lotof engineers, it takes a while for them to
develop those skills and know how to deal withclients and the personal side of things.
(30:38):
So that kind of comes later.
We hit that kind of year 4 5.
This is where we start really pushing that.
But yeah, that's.
And there are certain engineers that maybetheir path is more technical and they're,
they're not really, they may not enjoy theinteractions side and may not be overly skilled
at that, but they may be great from a technicalstandpoint.
(31:00):
So, that doesn't really fit with our team, butengineers I had in the past that we've that
I've worked with in the past have been that wayat certain ones.
And, there can be roles for that.
And, but yeah, there's, it's a big need andsomething that's not learned in school.
You really have
to have experience.
So, okay.
So there's obviously training that has tohappen.
(31:21):
Can all be documented and really this is theare you in person or remote or a bit of both?
Yeah, we're in person in the office.
So we have the ability to work remote and havepeople work hybrid from time to time, but we're
largely in the office as, as our approach.
So tell us a little bit about, sort of how thedifferent pieces are learned.
(31:47):
So you're documenting, does that, does anyonethat's newer, do they just ask any random
engineer, Hey, or any person in the company,Hey, how do you do this?
Is that, is that how it works?
No, we generally try to pair people up a littlebit.
They may have, one person they deal with moreso than others or maybe 2.
(32:07):
But they're pretty well targeted and paired upwith the people that we expect them to be
working with the most.
And it depends which area they're gonna beworking in.
Our main two service areas are still connectiondesign, and miscellaneous still design.
So depending on where we have the biggest need,we'll pair people up with someone in the same
(32:30):
service area that they
are.
Okay.
So if you're pairing them up, is the personthat you're pairing them up with know
everything that's needed to know about thecompany or, you know, how how things are done
process wise?
That's the hope.
Yeah.
(32:51):
I mean, we're doing that with Yeah.
We make sure it's somebody that that knows whatthey need to be training or if it's, if there's
a need to have multiple people, helping trainthe new hire, then we'll have someone hit a
certain, Maybe somebody hits the technical sideand somebody else explains the project
management side or the business side or the whythings are done.
(33:16):
Has every hire worked out for you?
Not quite.
So from an engineering, early engineeringroles, every engineer we've hired is here and
is a great fit.
We've we've got a perfect track record there.
And some of the other, supportive roles, we'vehad a little more growing pains.
(33:39):
There's really only a couple hires that I lookback on and, think I should have seen that
coming or or realized that it wasn't gonna bethe right fit.
And it wasn't, we hired, I mean, none of themwere bad people or anything.
It was just sometimes not the right fit.
Whether it's from our standpoint of what weneeded or from their standpoint of what their
skills were, what they were looking for.
(34:01):
So, like our office manager role, we we've beenthrough a couple hires there that didn't work
out.
And, one of those, it was, our first officemanager hire was, in February of 2020.
And she had been a stay at home mom and had acouple of kids in school and she had, she was
ready to get a job and then, well, COVIDhappens.
(34:23):
And, that changed everything there.
She ended up resigning after I think 2 monthsbecause now her kids were at home doing school
remotely.
And, and there's nothing really looking back onthat that we could have done differently there.
It just ended up not being the right fit forher because everything changed at that point.
(34:43):
But, Yeah.
We've outside of that, there's another hirethat ended up just not being the right fit and
both, we both knew it after probably 6 weeksand moved on and, no hard feelings and, but
yeah, otherwise we we've been pretty fortunatefrom a hiring standpoint.
(35:08):
Yeah.
Your track record is actually very good, right?
Like if it's like, oh, there's 2 positions that
were harder, but all of our
what we do as a service, you know, those allworked out great.
Like, that's a that's a good place to believe.
I think most owners and founders would love ifthat was the case for them.
So, no, that that's awesome.
That's probably a piece of why you've been ableto grow a 108%.
(35:30):
So explain explain to us all the strategiesthere.
Like, how did how did that occur?
Obviously, being part of the Inc.
5000, super cool, but the growth, is really thesuper exciting part.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think the interesting part to methat I'm proud of making that list is the fact
that we weren't really, that wasn't a goal.
It just kind of happened because we were tryingto help grow to serve our clients.
(35:54):
And there were times we probably could havegrown faster, but I didn't want to.
I didn't want to hire too many people tooquickly to the point where our work product
diminished.
We had to maintain quality and there were somegrowing pains at times with that growth, but we
did a pretty good job of making sure we didn'tgrow so fast that our workload went or our work
(36:17):
went downhill and our reputation did as well.
So we're, we kind of managed that pretty welland grew and in a sustainable way, in a way
that was methodical, and have continued togrow.
This year, our growth rate's not gonna be ashigh.
It's slowing down a little bit, but we'recontinuing to grow.
(36:38):
We're building an office edition right now.
That'll give us 50% more space so that we haveroom for continued growth over the next few
years.
How were you so wise to know that you didn'twant to grow as fast, right?
Like everybody wants to grow, right?
Like that's, that's pretty straightforward,especially if you're on this show, you want to
grow like that's, that's, there's no questionabout that.
(37:00):
However, growth can get dangerous, right, toyour point.
Like, you you throw quality out the window andthings like that can occur.
How did you know to say no to certain things orto not, you know, try to market in certain
ways?
Like, how did you know that you didn't want todo it that way?
Jason Some of it was just gut feel and kind offeelings of where we're at in terms of our
processes and whether we were, with the staff,we had a fairly young staff at one point, cause
(37:25):
we had hired a lot of engineers out of college.
And it was letting them get to the point wherethey were more experienced and could take on
more that we were able to keep hiring and growfurther.
But really a lot of it comes down to knowingthe importance of what we're doing and the fact
that we, we can't make mistakes.
Like not saying we're perfect.
We do make mistakes, but they have to beminimal mistakes.
(37:47):
They have to be small mistakes because wecan't, we can't put bad quality work out there
when what we're doing is designing steel forstructures that have a huge amount of money and
resources tied to them.
So we, we had to make sure that as we weregrowing, we're maintaining quality and make
sure we could continue to do that as we grew.
(38:09):
You mentioned something which I foundinteresting.
How do you quantify minimal mistakes?
Right?
So when does it become a big mistake versusminimal mistake?
Yep.
This is fine.
This is totally understandable or whatever,right.
Versus major mistake, major F up where someonecould get potentially fired or, or otherwise.
(38:30):
Right.
Where's where's the line or, or maybe I'mblowing it out of proportion, but where's the
line where minimal mistake.
Okay.
This is just part of your path versus what doesthat next?
So I guess this is kind of a 2 part question.
What does that next level of sort ofconsequences versus minimal mistake?
So one way I explained that to our team a fewmonths ago was will the client remember this in
(38:55):
a year?
So if you miss a schedule about a day, theymight be upset right then.
And we don't wanna miss schedules, but I'drather miss a schedule than send out something
that's not accurate or not complete to ourstandards.
Part of it is if they'll remember it in a year,then it's probably a major mistake.
(39:16):
If it's a mix up between, whether we providedbolts and a connection or welds for the field
And it's one connection.
Maybe that's a mistake if it's doesn't meetwhat they wanted, but that's probably not
something they're gonna remember in a year.
But if we screw up a connection that happens 3on a large data center, that's something
(39:37):
they're gonna remember and something that couldend a relationship.
So really, ultimately the the biggest thingsthat we can't have happen are mistakes that
could lead to failures because costing money orschedule is one thing, but failures are
another.
And that's something that we just have toabsolutely do everything we can to avoid.
(40:01):
Do you have one of those, those signs at, like,a nuclear plant where it's, like, 0 days since
last, incident and yours is, like, since 2017since the last incident?
No.
We we don't have that, but
So it's an interesting, so I really like theconcept.
(40:23):
I love the mindset.
I think for someone that's experienced, it'sreally easy to understand what that level of
mistakes is or are.
What about someone new or someone newer you'veeven said, right?
When they come out of college, they only know10% of what they need to know.
So for them to understand sort of whichmistakes are more okay and which mistakes are
(40:49):
less okay.
Like, you know, okay.
Structural failures.
Right.
Not okay.
I think everyone can understand that.
Right.
But if that's the extreme, that's a level ten.
We'll call it problem.
Right?
Right.
And a level one is I left my pencil in thetruck or whatever, you know, something just
(41:13):
asinine like that.
Right.
So, because you are dealing with either you'redealing with your own internal team or they're
dealing with clients, how do they evaluatethat?
Especially if they don't have the experienceyet to understand this sort of framework or
mindset of will the client remember this in ayear?
(41:34):
Is it actually understood or does it still.
No,
but I would say it's up to myself and ourproject management and our leaders to not put
them in a position to make that kind ofmistake.
So we have to be aware of what they are readyto handle and be able to review and manage what
they're working on to keep them from being ableto make that any large mistakes.
(41:59):
So it, I would say if a new engineer that wasless than you've experienced made a level ten
mistake, well, that's maybe partially theirfault, but it's ultimately on our management
team for putting them in a position where theycouldn't do.
Really interesting how you put that on there.
So, if you're putting it on management orleadership, what are they evaluating?
(42:21):
What are they evaluating or how are theyevaluating?
Is there a metric, to help them understand, youknow, the level of mistake?
Can you remember Dustin help me with theterminology are that, people are promoted to
the level of their incompetence, I think is,is, I think that what I heard once.
(42:45):
I'm not I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Are you are you saying, promoted in spite oftheir incompetence?
No.
They're promoted.
So they're really great at the level of jobthat they are at.
But if they get promoted, let's say into aleadership role or management role, all of a
sudden they are they become incompetent intheir role, even though they could do all the
stuff below.
Yep.
The the okay.
(43:06):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
The capacity component, because you're in aseat that's too big for you, then deter it
deteriorates the quality of what you are.
Your output is, I don't, I don't have a fancierway to say that though.
So that evaluation, right?
Putting someone into a position, if it's up tothe leader, is there a metric or how do you, is
(43:28):
there a way to define that?
There's not a metric or a way to define itclearly that I can think of, but it's more so
that person, the project manager or whoever'smanaging that, that project, that, that new
hire, they should be working closely enoughwith that person to, or that engineer to have a
pretty good feel for what their capabilitiesare.
(43:51):
And then we also have a quality control processwhere our senior engineers are reviewing the
work done by, EITs or, or engineers andtraining.
So, through that process, we should be makingsure that one that expectations are clear that
the, the EIT knows when to ask questions andthat they don't go off the rails in the wrong
(44:16):
direction.
And that their work's being reviewed to makesure we're not putting out any mistakes or very
minimal mistakes, mistakes that don't have alarge impact.
Okay.
So this is a constant evaluation.
This isn't a thing that happens today,tomorrow.
It's a constantly reevaluate it.
Largely.
Yeah.
(44:37):
Because engineers get better over time.
Just like anybody is there in the role more andwork on different types of projects, or it may
be that engineer a is familiar with datacenters.
And they've worked on several data centerprojects and they're really good at those.
And we know that if we keep them on that typeof project, they're gonna do good, consistent
(44:59):
work.
But if we put them on a stadium project thatthey've never worked on before, we're gonna
have to watch them very closely and make surethat they understand what they're doing and
what they need to do.
So a lot of it comes back to knowing your teamand what they're good at and what what their
strengths are.
When do you think that that becomes reality?
(45:19):
We obviously we talked about when you're at alarge company, there's more specialization in
role.
Right?
Like that's that's that's piece of it.
So as a small company, a lot of hats.
Okay.
So when when do you see some more of thatchange to that special, Jason?
Like, hey.
Like, you are, you know, the head of datacenters.
You're the head of stadiums or you're the youknow, like, when when does that essentially
(45:42):
organization or accountability chart startbecoming more real?
So right now we're at 13 people.
I think each year as we grow, we're kind ofreevaluating that and kind of thinking through
our org chart, kind of how, how we'restructured and makes sense.
And I would say for us, like as we get past 15or up to 16, 18 people, things went, we
(46:06):
probably need to structure things a little bitdifferently.
Cause right now I'm able to still stay involvedwith most projects and have a handle on most
everything we have going on.
But we're, but that's getting less and lesseach year and more is being delegated to our
project management team.
And whereas a year and a half, 2 years ago, weonly had 2 project managers, myself and our VP.
(46:29):
Now we've got 5.
So things are getting spread out more.
And, and as we grow, it'll keep getting thatway where things are being distributed more
workload is being distributed more, amongstmore people.
So yeah, I think it's something that is, ascompanies grow, you have to evaluate and see
what makes sense at that point in time.
Because what we're doing now may not be goodenough in 2 years, we may have to do things
(46:55):
differently or we will be doing things.
Yeah.
So then when you have your strategy meetings,that becomes, top concern.
What about yourself?
Right?
Obviously when you started, you were thedefinitive doer.
Like, you did everything.
You did it all.
Now 13 people.
So now that there's a lot more, we call it thebusiness side, right, not the service execution
(47:17):
side, but, like, the, Hey, I have to run abusiness.
Like, what does that kind of balance look likenow for you?
Yeah.
So kind of along the same lines every year, Ithink I'm doing less production engineering.
At this point, I'm doing very little productionon projects.
It's more coordination on projects, review ofprojects, talking strategy, big picture
(47:37):
approaches, and then also the sales andbusiness development and, overseeing all the
other aspects of the business.
So that's, I've learned that I enjoy the bizreally enjoy engineering, but also really enjoy
the business side of things.
And I like both, which is great because Idon't, I don't think it could be easy to just
(47:58):
want to stay doing engineering and put off allthe business side of things.
But there's a few things I don't enjoy doing,but for the most part, enjoy business aspects.
And, but that's something too that we're tryingto offload or not offload, but help set up
different people to help out more in differentareas, whether it be estimating or our office
(48:21):
managers taking a big role in a new softwaresystem.
We're trying to set up for proposals for CRMfor 25 and it's great to have additional people
on our team to count on to help move thoseefforts forward.
Because there used to be a time when if Iwasn't working, nothing happened with the
business.
That was a big step.
(48:41):
Once we had a couple employees, it kinda hit meone day.
Like I went on a site visit or something andit's like work is actually being done right now
while I'm not in the office doing it.
And that was, pretty cool.
It's cool feeling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
This has been, this has been really great.
We have one more question though, that we, wantto ask you.
And now that we know you're an avid listenerand you probably know what's coming, but
(49:04):
nonetheless, we'll ask it anyways.
Tyler, if you could go back 20 years, whatadvice would you give yourself?
Oh, maybe you didn't know it was coming.
I think you did though.
Maybe I didn't think about it enough.
Yeah.
Perhaps.
I guess trust the process and know that as youalways keep improving and know that if you keep
doing that, it'll work out, I guess, and keeplearning.
(49:26):
Yeah.
Well, you're doing a lot of the right stuffbecause obviously, the accolades and the growth
definitely shows it.
So kudos to you, and keep keep it.
Keep, improving and, trusting the process.
Good, good advice.
We're gonna throw all social stuff and all thatfun stuff in the show notes.
But if somebody wanted to get ahold of you,what's the best way for them to do that?
(49:46):
LinkedIn works or email's great, but I'm activeon LinkedIn.
That's probably the easiest place to find meand reach out.
Okay.
That works.
And then, is there anything else you'd like totell people before we say our goodbyes?
Thank I think we've about covered it.
So I appreciate you guys having me
on the podcast.
I really enjoyed it.
Okay.
Cool.
Listeners, this is, Tyler Cease, founder of SSEor Southern Structural Engineers.
(50:12):
Right?
That's right.
Right?
So
that's Steel engineers.
Steel.
Wow.
Structure and steel.
We talk too much about steel structure.
Southern Steel Engineers.
And, until next time.
Adios.
Thanks for listening to Building Scale.
To help us reach even more people, please sharethis episode with a friend, colleague, or on
social media.
Remember, the 3 pillars of scaling a businessare people, process, and technology.
(50:38):
And our mission is to help the AEC industryprotect itself by making technology easy.
So if you think your company's technologypillar could view some improvement, book a call
with us to see how we can help maximize your ITcybersecurity strategy.
Just go to building scale dotnet/help.
(51:01):
And until next time.
Keep building scale.
Scale.
I think most owners and founders would love ifthat was the case for them.
(00:04):
So, no, that that's awesome.
That's probably a piece of why you've been ableto grow a 108%.
So Sure.
Explain explain to us all the strategies there.
What like, how did how did that occur?
Obviously, being part of the Inc.
5000, super cool, but the growth, is really thesuper exciting part.
Have you ever wondered how successfularchitecture, engineering, and construction
(00:27):
companies scale their business?
Or have you ever wanted guidance on how to getmore growth, wealth, and freedom from your AEC
company?
Well, then you are in luck.
Hi.
I'm Will Forat.
And I'm Justin Nagel, and we're your podcasthosts.
We interview successful AEC business leaders tolearn how they use people, process, and
(00:47):
technology to scale their businesses.
So sit back and get ready to learn from theindustry's best.
This is
building scale.
Hey, listeners.
It's Will here.
Our mission is to help the AC industry protectitself by making technology easy.
If you've ever listened to our show, then youknow that the 3 pillars of scaling a business
(01:10):
are people, process, and technology.
So if you suspect technology is your weak link,then book a call with us to see where we can
help maximize your company's IP cybersecuritystrategy.
Just go to building scale dot net slash health.
Today's guest is the founder of Southern SteelEngineers or SSE, Eiler Sees.
(01:33):
SSE is a structural engineering firmspecializing in delegated steel design,
including connection design, shop drawingreviews, and erection engineering.
Tyler Sees is a licensed professional engineer,a structural engineer, and a certified welding
inspector with over 15 years of experience instructural engineering and steel construction.
They hold engineering licenses from 46 states,bringing a nationwide perspective to steel
(01:57):
design and construction.
Under his leadership, SSE has earnedrecognition as best firm to work for by his Y
Group in 2024 and is featured on the Inc 51,000 list for its a 108% growth rate.
Tyler leads team of 13, delivering innovativeand cost effective steel solutions while
fostering an award winning company culture.
(02:18):
And with all that said, Tyler, welcome to theshow.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate you having me on.
Yeah.
As we said before, I don't have a whiteboardanymore.
I moved I moved I moved, places.
So I don't want the Totally different.
People that view the podcast on Spotify orYouTube or wherever, they're they don't get
alarmed that I'm I'm somewhere else.
(02:39):
So, yes.
But I said a bunch of nice stuff, Tyler, buttell us the the true story.
How did you get into, the space and, tell usabout SSE.
Yeah.
So I guess,
I kind of got led into steel.
My father had a steel detailing business.
So I started working with him when I was ateenager, came to work with him in the summers
before I could drive or anything startedlearning steel and always liked math and
(03:03):
science.
So went into engineering and with the steelbackground kind of geared towards structural
engineering.
And after college started with a steelfabricator doing structural engineering for all
sorts of steel projects.
And one thing led to another and eventually,2017, started SSE.
And we've just been building scale since thenand just, just growing.
(03:27):
And, Yeah, that's kind of the gist of it.
Got it.
So you are very niched in compared, sent to,like a steel erector or something like that.
Explain that a little bit for listeners so theyhave a good understanding.
So we're a niche firm.
So most structural engineering firms workprimarily for architects, whereas we work
primarily for steel fabricators, steeldetailers, or steel erectors.
(03:52):
And then while it, typical structuralengineering firm will work in all different
building materials, steel, concrete, wood,light gauge, masonry.
We're really focused on steel.
By being niche, it allows us to specialize insteel and really develop a level of expertise
(04:13):
where we can really serve our clients reallywell.
So that's what we're specialized in and that'swhat we do.
So tell us a little bit about your background,right?
Cause, you were not, you know, you weren'talways in here.
You were in a very, very large company.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that andthen what translates?
(04:37):
Yeah.
So I started out working for, a large fortune500 company.
So we were a structural engineering departmentwithin, CMC and commercial metals.
So we worked for the steel fabricators.
So it was kind of a little bit of a hybridbecause our group was 10 to 12 engineers, but
(04:59):
we're part of a massive company.
So I got to see kind of some of the benefits oflarge corporate structures and some of the kind
of downsides of, of large corporate structures.
And so when I started SSE, we tried to reallyemphasize building out a strong benefits
(05:20):
program.
I mean, initially we didn't have that, but thatthe goal was to build it up.
And we did that.
And then a lot of organization within ourcompany.
But then on the other side, moving away fromthe corporate structure, really wanted to put
an emphasis on a team approach from thestandpoint of being able to have a pretty flat
organization where we can make decisionsquickly.
(05:43):
Large corporate structures just lend themselvesto layers of hierarchy, and rightfully so
that's how it works, but we're able to be verynimble and make decisions quickly, make
judgment calls, which is nice.
So if recently we had an employee whosedaughter was in the hospital for a few weeks
and we're able to make an exception and letthem handle that and not have any repercussions
(06:10):
here or, or we're able to pay them for thattime and let them handle that on a personal
side.
So those are things that as a small business,we're able to do that maybe large businesses
aren't able to accommodate.
So.
A difference in cultures, small businesscompared to large.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very every, I mean, and we'restill a small business.
(06:32):
We've grown a lot, but we're at 13 people now,but everybody knows everybody.
We've got a very team oriented approach andable to be very collaborative across the whole
company.
So what, what doesn't work?
What doesn't translate from, I mean, they're afortune 500 company.
What doesn't translate?
Because I mean, they've scaled right.
(06:52):
Fortune 500, you have to have scaled.
So what does something, some things don'ttranslate or don't work well on the smaller
business side.
What have you seen that doesn't work well?
I mean, I guess one thing would be that we haveto wear a lot of hats.
We don't have departments.
We don't have an HR department.
We don't have an IT department.
We're especially early on, I was having to do alittle bit of everything.
(07:16):
As we've scaled up, we've added, our officemanager now helps with a variety of areas.
But we don't have a full dedicated team for anyof the business departments of the, of the
company, if that makes sense.
So if it's accounting or HR it, we've kindagotta be able to jump in and help where needed
and figure things out and be very flexible.
(07:39):
So, whereas with a large corporate structure,you've got a lot of silos of, different areas
that people stay focused in.
We've we're spread out more in different areas.
I guess this kind of really translates totalking about people managing people then
doesn't it?
(08:00):
Because it looks a little different, wearingmultiple hats and whatnot.
Which means that hiring people isn't just abouthiring, you know, isn't specific to exactly one
job?
This is your, this is your cog.
This is your job.
And then that's it.
Right.
There's, there's obviously a lot more to it.
(08:21):
Tell us a little bit about, we'll say yourlearning lessons in hiring, you know, hiring
your people.
Yeah.
So as we've grown, we've been able to get alittle bit more compartmentalized with certain
positions to where they're more down to theirjob responsibilities.
Like early on myself and our VP, we werewearing all the hats, doing a little bit of
(08:43):
everything.
In terms of hiring, some of it, I don't know ifwe've done a good job or we've just gotten
lucky, but we've got a really great team atleast.
We've not had an issue with turnover and we puta lot of work into trying to hire the right
people.
Sometimes it's hard to even know until youactually get somebody on board and start work,
start working with them, but you make the bestdecisions you can based on the information you
(09:07):
have.
And one thing that we implemented probably 5years ago or so was an assessment that we use.
And it measures a variety of personalitytraits, but also cognitive traits.
So we're able to get some information toobjectively compare candidates and make sure
they fit in with our team and also make sure,like one of the aspects of our, assessment is,
(09:32):
mini visualization, spatial visualization.
So it's got all these different cubes andgeometric shapes and shows different rotations.
And then you have to be able to look at it andtell if they're the same shape or not, just
rotate it.
And that's something that we've had PhDcandidates that completely had, I mean, didn't
(09:55):
get any of those right.
And then we've had other people like maybe foran office manager role that they can see that
stuff.
So a large part of what we do is seeing thingsin 3 d, looking at 3 d models, looking at
drawings and being able to visualize in 3 d.
So that's just a small part of what we do tokind of make sure we're getting the right
(10:16):
people.
That's on the cognitive side.
And that's a skill that I'm not sure how muchof that is purely natural and how much can be
learned.
But I think that's something that, I mean,you're not learning that in school was kind of
an enlarged part.
I think most people can either kind of do thator not.
So that's part of it, but other parts are likeliking a structured environment.
(10:37):
So if we are looking to hiring an engineer,engineers have to be very regimented.
We have to follow codes.
We have to provide calculations.
We have to do things in a consistent,methodical approach.
If someone comes up on the assessment is likinga very flexible workspace where they can kind
of do things their own way, that's probably notthe right fit for what we're looking for.
(11:00):
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's other positions that's good for.
But from an engineering standpoint, thatwouldn't be a good fit.
Because that really then brings liability to,to the company.
Right.
Yeah.
The opposite effect is, if you're notregimented, miss misstep, skip a step, either
(11:21):
something happens with the building falls apartor someone gets hurt.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's something we have to alwayskeep in mind is what we're doing is really
important.
We can't afford mistakes because it's not justmoney involved.
If a structure fails, I mean, there could beloss of life and that's the last thing we ever
want to have to deal with.
(11:42):
And so we, we have to maintain a very highlevel of accuracy and, know that we can trust
our team.
How are you able to be still structured withsuch a high growth rate?
Right?
Obviously, we've seen this at Spot.
When you grow significantly Yeah.
It it creates problems operationally.
Right?
Like, it just that's inherently what happens.
(12:02):
So you guys grew a ton.
So, how were you able to stay on top of that?
There's been some challenges.
Part of it is from the beginning, we've triedto, even when we were 2 or 3 people, we tried
to think long term and put together processesof how we were going to do things to help keep
us consistent and give us an approach thatpeople could follow.
(12:25):
And we've, we've had to work through that and,and really put effort into improving our
processes along the way and making them morerepeatable.
And then we're working on, we're still workingthrough now really documenting that even
better.
Because for a while we were adding 1 employee ayear and then, since 22, it's been 2 or 3 a
(12:48):
year.
So, I guess at times there's been a lot on ourmanagers to project managers to really stay on
top of new hires and, get them to a point wherethey either know what to do, or they understand
their limitations and know when to askquestions and get help.
That's a big thing too.
(13:09):
Are you hiring before the the need or hiringGrant?
Perfect.
We
all should
have hired 3, 6 months ago, because I assumethat what you do is is fairly technical.
So either you're hiring somebody that's superveteran or you're hiring somebody that needs a
lot of training.
(13:29):
Right?
So explain this actually share your kind ofhiring philosophy in that regard, what it looks
like.
Yeah.
We've tried to stay in front of
it as much as we could.
That's been difficult at times because some ofour largest clients, they've gone through huge
growth rates as well.
So it's been hard to keep up at times withtheir demand.
(13:50):
But yeah, we've tried to stay in front of itand we've tried to identify which areas of the
business we needed help in next.
So like I guess in 22, we hired an estimatorfor the first time.
Before that our engineers were doing all of ourestimating for new projects.
So that was something that helped buildcapacity by getting some of that work to
(14:12):
someone who could focus on estimating.
And then just this year, we hired someone tohelp out with shop drawing reviews.
So it's a steel detailer with 30 years ofexperience and he's been a big help to our team
and given us the ability to, have ourengineering team have more help on different
aspects of the project.
And, that has helped lead to growth as well,because while we didn't add engineering
(14:37):
capacity with that role, we were able to freeup more engineering time with that role.
So you're essentially looking at the services,how much time is spent on the actual service.
Some companies call billable hours.
Right?
But then this is us.
This is in our world.
We call this soft cost, right?
(14:57):
What is, what is killing you death by a 1,000paper cuts or otherwise, these are soft costs
that don't show up on the P and L.
They don't show up.
You know, the only indicators that you have issort of the, whatever metrics you have for
productivity, but even that's hard to measure,but knowing that you've hold some of that,
(15:18):
those job functions off of either a group ofpeople or everyone, everyone's sort of
responsible, but no one's actually responsible
for
some of those internal components.
Right.
So if
you pull, pull it off of, let's say, you know,3, 5 people every single one of them has now
gotten a little bit more time to work on.
We'll call it the billable hour versus versuswhat's not billable, but still important
(15:42):
because it, then this is, you can't operate ifyou don't do the internal stuff.
That's right.
Yeah.
And our office managers helped out a lot too,in different processes.
Like when we get an updated drawings onprojects, kind of having a standardized way of
doing that and taking more workload off of ourengineering team.
Because our engineering team has been at maxcapacity for several years now.
(16:07):
We've kind of just constantly doing our best tokeep up from a growth standpoint.
So it's been, we've grown a lot outside of ourengineering roles in the past 2 years.
We've added engineers too, but we've reallymade the jump from having just engineers to
having more positions that are able to help ourbusiness overall.
(16:29):
Doctor.
Supporting roles, for the engineers.
You know, if you look at pretty much the entireindustry, hard tactical engineering, it's
really, they're all, it's all serviced.
Yes.
There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot ofhardware, if you will.
There's a lot of hard components to them, wood,steel, etcetera.
(16:49):
Right.
These are your, this is your cost of goods soldfor creating the structures, but then the
people side, this is your, this is where youhave the ability to manage it better.
Right?
So you said max capacity, but your max capacityfor your engineers changed even by pulling,
let's say, some of the, some of the stuffthat's not directly billable.
(17:11):
That's one way to change the max capacity ofyour engineers.
Right.
So all of
a sudden,
and so yes, they've been working full time.
They've been working potentially even overtime, but now the capacity is even higher
because they pulled up just that soft cost oftime considering into
it.
That's right.
Yeah.
And that was something we looked at.
We do annual strategic planning each year inJanuary, and that was something we looked at
(17:35):
last year.
I was looking at our projected engineeringhours and kind of our revenue goals and, looked
at the fact that if we hired someone to helpout with shop drawing review, how much that
would help free up engineering hours?
Because they can't, we have more shop drawingreview than one person can handle, but that
really frees up a lot of time for engineeringteam and really adds to our capacity and
(17:58):
ability to drive more revenue growth.
So how do you evaluate, let's say the as youwere doing it strategically, how do you
evaluate that?
Or how do you figure out that, oh, this is,this is time spent that should be offloaded to
someone else.
Yeah.
So some of it is looking at the, so we trackour time in a different way than a lot of
(18:21):
firms.
We're not looking at, so we don't do timesheets in a traditional traditional sense.
But we track time on projects to make surewe're staying on budget.
But people are spending time on developmentitems or, professional development.
We're not, we're not worried about our team notcarrying their weight and working hard.
So we're not fracking that stuff.
But so each year I look at how much time spentin our different service areas.
(18:43):
And then we look at projected needs for thefollowing year and try to determine where we
could use help and whether that's someone inconnection design, an engineer for connection
design or engineer for miscellaneous design orshop drive view, or maybe our engineers are
spending too much time on estimating.
We're trying to identify where we could usepeople to help us continue to grow and not get
(19:08):
bottlenecked.
And that's something that we've dealt with.
When you're a small firm and 2 people are onvacation at the same time, it's a disaster.
So we, that's something that we've tried togrow as we've grown, we're trying to make sure
we have redundant redundant, personnel.
Well, not personnel, but from the standpoint ofwe have an option, a backup option for each
(19:30):
important function in the business.
So that if, if somebody in estimating is out onvacation, we've got someone else to cover.
If somebody in connection design is onvacation, we've got somebody to cover and
growing that makes us more resilient becausewe're not so it still matters anytime somebody
with, when you're 13 people, one person's onvacation for a week, it still makes an impact,
(19:53):
but we're able to better work around that nowthan we were in the past.
And then from a projection standpoint, likeback to strategic planning, one thing we look
at is our revenue per employee or revenue perengineer.
And we're able to kind of make pretty goodguesses at what our revenue targets are for the
(20:16):
following year based on those numbers.
Because we've got a lot of good data now.
We actually couple of years ago, I got reallylucky and got within 1% of, what our, who ended
up being.
That was more luck than still.
But yeah,
it's pretty, right.
At least twice a day, right?
That's right.
So, but it's, it's a pretty good guess at wherewe're gonna fall and kind of what, what revenue
(20:42):
range we can get to with a certain amount oftrained people.
But that's the big thing.
You gotta have people that are trained well andunderstand what they're doing and can deliver
at a high level.
So let's talk about that for a second, youknow, training.
How long
does it take to get someone that's nearly hiredto the point where they're able to start
(21:03):
producing?
They might not be effectively producing, butlet's just get them to producing and then
further that to effectively producing.
It varies a little bit.
So we've hired now probably I think 5 engineersright out of college.
And we've got a track record now of kind ofknowing how to train those engineers up because
(21:26):
I tell people sometimes in interviews and theydon't like it, but I was like, you've learned
probably 10% of what you need to know when inwith your bachelor's degree.
There's a lot you have to learn outside ofschool.
But I would say in general, the 1st 3 to 4months are pretty much a watch.
There's not gonna be a lot of production there.
(21:47):
It's, we're expecting the 1st 3 to 4 months arelargely training and we'll get them involved on
projects and working on things once they startgetting a feel, but it's not very productive.
And, that's fine as part of the process.
And we're expecting that.
And usually by the time they hit 6 months,they're starting to starting to help out more.
(22:12):
And by year, usually people are in a, we've gotthem to the spot that they're pretty
productive.
They're not fully trained yet.
They don't know everything.
And really in this business, you never knoweverything.
It's always, there's always something to learn.
But, the 1st 3 to 4 months, we're not gettingmuch production at all out of new hires.
It, it, it takes some time.
(22:33):
So in other words, losing revenue on them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we were to hire somebody an engineerright out of college and they stuck around 6
months and left, that really wouldn't be goodfor us.
So then how do you make sure that they do staylonger than 6 months?
Well, fortunately, every engineer we've hiredis still with us.
(22:53):
We've, we've done a good job of, like I said,with hiring, we've either done a good job or
we've gotten really lucky because we've madegood hires.
And I think part of it is we don't putunrealistic expectations on them initially from
a training standpoint or knowledge standpoint.
We expect them to not be productive the 1st 3months.
And we'll explain to them like, now's the time,ask all the questions.
(23:15):
Like, don't worry about whether you think it'sa dumb question, like ask all your questions.
And our team is very collaborative and, we arein office.
So that helps a lot with training, I think, anddoing that in person and working, we try to be
patient with people early on and really focuson the fundamentals and teaching them the
(23:36):
background in the business and the engineeringof what we do.
And I think that has helped a lot in retention.
And then aside from the training, it's goodbenefits and a supportive team approach, and
things like that, that help as well.
How do you manage effectively?
Like did you manage prior?
And then if you did, what, what did you learnfrom that?
(23:58):
And then if not, how have you discovered yourown path for managing people?
Right.
Obviously you gotta hire the right people.
Right.
That's that's step.
And and look, it sounds like that piece ishappening, but you're also, they're sticking
around.
Right.
So like inherently, you're you must be doing atleast something pretty well.
Yeah.
So the answer to that is no.
I'd never managed anybody before and it waspurely like trial by fire.
(24:22):
So kind of just figuring it out as we as wewent.
And I mean, I've made mistakes.
I mean, I've had to learn and try to educatemyself on how to manage people and how to,
manage different types of people.
And I'm still trying to get better at that andstill learning because something that works for
one person may not work for another person.
(24:44):
And some people take constructive criticismfine and others take it differently, and you
have to approach it a different way andsomething I'm continuously trying to learn and
get better at as we grow up.
I just had a similar conversation with somebodyabout every person's different.
Right?
Like, every person responds differently, andyour job as the leader is to figure that out.
(25:05):
What is their way that you're gonna then getthe most out of them?
If you if you did everything the same all thetime for everybody, you probably get, you know,
some people will be better, some people be alittle worse, and you might get some form of
consistency.
But if you wanna truly get the most out ofpeople, you gotta understand them and how they
take.
That's right.
Yeah.
And as we added non engineering positions, thatwas
(25:26):
a little
more of a challenge because not all engineersare the same, but in large part, engineers,
engineers are pretty introverted and logicbased and kind of have a lot of similarities.
So as we added people in different roles, wehad more personalities and different types of
people to that I had to learn to help manageand learn how to work efficiently with them.
(25:52):
Not to mention, their definition of fun is alittle different too.
Yeah.
Yes.
Not everybody loves spreadsheets the wayengineers do.
Weird.
Super weird.
What, so what you do is very, very technical,or, you know, very, very similar.
As to you, right, you have to quality thequality of what we do has to to be there.
(26:13):
So do you have full documentation of yourprocesses?
Like, what is what is that look like as you're,one, training people, but then also just for
people to have as a resource as they go?
We're not where we wanna be.
We have some of it documented well, but that'ssomething that we so we set goals each quarter
and each year.
And that's something we wanna hit hard in q oneis working on really tying down our
(26:38):
documentation for some of that, for standardprocedures.
Some of it, the other part of it is, so we havea company intranet that we're building out and
it's within there, we have a knowledge basethat we're working on.
And, so right now we don't have AI in thatsoftware at some point.
We either will, or we'll move to something elsethat people will be able to ask questions to
(27:04):
and ref get more out of that knowledge basequicker.
So that's something that we want to keepbuilding that data so that even if we're not
using it from that standpoint yet, we will atsome point.
And yeah, we're right now.
It's a lot, a lot of things had to be passeddown kind of from engineer to engineer.
If this is how we do things and we're, we'retrying to now really formalize that a lot
(27:28):
better so that people can reference it.
Or when we hire somebody new, they have that tolean on.
Do you feel like everything has to be writtendown or because then maybe I should ask is all
the documentation is it written is in videoformat?
How do you document?
Let's start with that.
Right now it's written or it's, documents or,snapshots or stuff like that.
(27:54):
We haven't gone the video route yet.
Engineers don't like video Sharpie no video.
So our team would not be terribly receptive to,that idea, but so we may consider that in the
future.
Cause I know there's some really good programsout there to help with documenting and
different things like that.
So if it's, so if it's written right, and ittakes, we'll say 4 months or so 3 to 6 months
(28:22):
to get someone to the point of where they'reproductive, honestly efficient, but they're
productive.
Is it at what point do you say, here you go,right?
Do you remove the human interaction side?
So let's say you had everything perfectlydocumented.
Is that even possible to go to essentially say,here you go and go read through this and then
(28:45):
you can start working as soon as you finishreading through that.
Does it work like that?
I think that'd be tough.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it wouldbe tough, but yeah, it could be it could be
done in certain areas.
Because there are some things that are morestraightforward and more consistent project to
project and other things that vary more andtake a lot more experience to see the a 100
(29:07):
different ways something may happen ondifferent types of projects.
But yeah, certain areas I think could be tieddown pretty well.
So this is, in our company, this is the what wecall the difference between science and art of
working on whatever, whatever it is.
Right.
Just like cooking.
There's a recipe, right.
(29:28):
Or there's a, there's a way to go about it.
It's very structured, but then there's the art,which is
in
what order, you do certain things based on theclient or based on the needs, right.
There's the human aspect.
Yeah.
Is the training with the human aspect, becauseI'm assuming that's part of where, where that
(29:52):
really happens.
And engineers, at least my experience withengineers has been because of is that the
communication isn't necessarily taught atschool on how to communicate with, let's say
end clients.
Is that the parts that you're talking about oris there something more?
I would say it's more than that.
The communication with clients doesn't reallyhappen until for us.
(30:13):
We like to wait until engineers have their PEs,their professional engineering license before
we have them dealing with clients a whole lot.
So that gets them 3 to 4 years of experienceand, more experience in the field and knowledge
before they're to that point.
But yeah, that that's a big thing because a lotof engineers, it takes a while for them to
develop those skills and know how to deal withclients and the personal side of things.
(30:38):
So that kind of comes later.
We hit that kind of year 4 5.
This is where we start really pushing that.
But yeah, that's.
And there are certain engineers that maybetheir path is more technical and they're,
they're not really, they may not enjoy theinteractions side and may not be overly skilled
at that, but they may be great from a technicalstandpoint.
(31:00):
So, that doesn't really fit with our team, butengineers I had in the past that we've that
I've worked with in the past have been that wayat certain ones.
And, there can be roles for that.
And, but yeah, there's, it's a big need andsomething that's not learned in school.
You really have
to have experience.
So, okay.
So there's obviously training that has tohappen.
(31:21):
Can all be documented and really this is theare you in person or remote or a bit of both?
Yeah, we're in person in the office.
So we have the ability to work remote and havepeople work hybrid from time to time, but we're
largely in the office as, as our approach.
So tell us a little bit about, sort of how thedifferent pieces are learned.
(31:47):
So you're documenting, does that, does anyonethat's newer, do they just ask any random
engineer, Hey, or any person in the company,Hey, how do you do this?
Is that, is that how it works?
No, we generally try to pair people up a littlebit.
They may have, one person they deal with moreso than others or maybe 2.
(32:07):
But they're pretty well targeted and paired upwith the people that we expect them to be
working with the most.
And it depends which area they're gonna beworking in.
Our main two service areas are still connectiondesign, and miscellaneous still design.
So depending on where we have the biggest need,we'll pair people up with someone in the same
(32:30):
service area that they
are.
Okay.
So if you're pairing them up, is the personthat you're pairing them up with know
everything that's needed to know about thecompany or, you know, how how things are done
process wise?
That's the hope.
Yeah.
(32:51):
I mean, we're doing that with Yeah.
We make sure it's somebody that that knows whatthey need to be training or if it's, if there's
a need to have multiple people, helping trainthe new hire, then we'll have someone hit a
certain, Maybe somebody hits the technical sideand somebody else explains the project
management side or the business side or the whythings are done.
(33:16):
Has every hire worked out for you?
Not quite.
So from an engineering, early engineeringroles, every engineer we've hired is here and
is a great fit.
We've we've got a perfect track record there.
And some of the other, supportive roles, we'vehad a little more growing pains.
(33:39):
There's really only a couple hires that I lookback on and, think I should have seen that
coming or or realized that it wasn't gonna bethe right fit.
And it wasn't, we hired, I mean, none of themwere bad people or anything.
It was just sometimes not the right fit.
Whether it's from our standpoint of what weneeded or from their standpoint of what their
skills were, what they were looking for.
(34:01):
So, like our office manager role, we we've beenthrough a couple hires there that didn't work
out.
And, one of those, it was, our first officemanager hire was, in February of 2020.
And she had been a stay at home mom and had acouple of kids in school and she had, she was
ready to get a job and then, well, COVIDhappens.
(34:23):
And, that changed everything there.
She ended up resigning after I think 2 monthsbecause now her kids were at home doing school
remotely.
And, and there's nothing really looking back onthat that we could have done differently there.
It just ended up not being the right fit forher because everything changed at that point.
(34:43):
But, Yeah.
We've outside of that, there's another hirethat ended up just not being the right fit and
both, we both knew it after probably 6 weeksand moved on and, no hard feelings and, but
yeah, otherwise we we've been pretty fortunatefrom a hiring standpoint.
(35:08):
Yeah.
Your track record is actually very good, right?
Like if it's like, oh, there's 2 positions that
were harder, but all of our
what we do as a service, you know, those allworked out great.
Like, that's a that's a good place to believe.
I think most owners and founders would love ifthat was the case for them.
So, no, that that's awesome.
That's probably a piece of why you've been ableto grow a 108%.
(35:30):
So explain explain to us all the strategiesthere.
Like, how did how did that occur?
Obviously, being part of the Inc.
5000, super cool, but the growth, is really thesuper exciting part.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think the interesting part to methat I'm proud of making that list is the fact
that we weren't really, that wasn't a goal.
It just kind of happened because we were tryingto help grow to serve our clients.
(35:54):
And there were times we probably could havegrown faster, but I didn't want to.
I didn't want to hire too many people tooquickly to the point where our work product
diminished.
We had to maintain quality and there were somegrowing pains at times with that growth, but we
did a pretty good job of making sure we didn'tgrow so fast that our workload went or our work
(36:17):
went downhill and our reputation did as well.
So we're, we kind of managed that pretty welland grew and in a sustainable way, in a way
that was methodical, and have continued togrow.
This year, our growth rate's not gonna be ashigh.
It's slowing down a little bit, but we'recontinuing to grow.
(36:38):
We're building an office edition right now.
That'll give us 50% more space so that we haveroom for continued growth over the next few
years.
How were you so wise to know that you didn'twant to grow as fast, right?
Like everybody wants to grow, right?
Like that's, that's pretty straightforward,especially if you're on this show, you want to
grow like that's, that's, there's no questionabout that.
(37:00):
However, growth can get dangerous, right, toyour point.
Like, you you throw quality out the window andthings like that can occur.
How did you know to say no to certain things orto not, you know, try to market in certain
ways?
Like, how did you know that you didn't want todo it that way?
Jason Some of it was just gut feel and kind offeelings of where we're at in terms of our
processes and whether we were, with the staff,we had a fairly young staff at one point, cause
(37:25):
we had hired a lot of engineers out of college.
And it was letting them get to the point wherethey were more experienced and could take on
more that we were able to keep hiring and growfurther.
But really a lot of it comes down to knowingthe importance of what we're doing and the fact
that we, we can't make mistakes.
Like not saying we're perfect.
We do make mistakes, but they have to beminimal mistakes.
(37:47):
They have to be small mistakes because wecan't, we can't put bad quality work out there
when what we're doing is designing steel forstructures that have a huge amount of money and
resources tied to them.
So we, we had to make sure that as we weregrowing, we're maintaining quality and make
sure we could continue to do that as we grew.
(38:09):
You mentioned something which I foundinteresting.
How do you quantify minimal mistakes?
Right?
So when does it become a big mistake versusminimal mistake?
Yep.
This is fine.
This is totally understandable or whatever,right.
Versus major mistake, major F up where someonecould get potentially fired or, or otherwise.
(38:30):
Right.
Where's where's the line or, or maybe I'mblowing it out of proportion, but where's the
line where minimal mistake.
Okay.
This is just part of your path versus what doesthat next?
So I guess this is kind of a 2 part question.
What does that next level of sort ofconsequences versus minimal mistake?
So one way I explained that to our team a fewmonths ago was will the client remember this in
(38:55):
a year?
So if you miss a schedule about a day, theymight be upset right then.
And we don't wanna miss schedules, but I'drather miss a schedule than send out something
that's not accurate or not complete to ourstandards.
Part of it is if they'll remember it in a year,then it's probably a major mistake.
(39:16):
If it's a mix up between, whether we providedbolts and a connection or welds for the field
And it's one connection.
Maybe that's a mistake if it's doesn't meetwhat they wanted, but that's probably not
something they're gonna remember in a year.
But if we screw up a connection that happens 3on a large data center, that's something
(39:37):
they're gonna remember and something that couldend a relationship.
So really, ultimately the the biggest thingsthat we can't have happen are mistakes that
could lead to failures because costing money orschedule is one thing, but failures are
another.
And that's something that we just have toabsolutely do everything we can to avoid.
(40:01):
Do you have one of those, those signs at, like,a nuclear plant where it's, like, 0 days since
last, incident and yours is, like, since 2017since the last incident?
No.
We we don't have that, but
So it's an interesting, so I really like theconcept.
(40:23):
I love the mindset.
I think for someone that's experienced, it'sreally easy to understand what that level of
mistakes is or are.
What about someone new or someone newer you'veeven said, right?
When they come out of college, they only know10% of what they need to know.
So for them to understand sort of whichmistakes are more okay and which mistakes are
(40:49):
less okay.
Like, you know, okay.
Structural failures.
Right.
Not okay.
I think everyone can understand that.
Right.
But if that's the extreme, that's a level ten.
We'll call it problem.
Right?
Right.
And a level one is I left my pencil in thetruck or whatever, you know, something just
(41:13):
asinine like that.
Right.
So, because you are dealing with either you'redealing with your own internal team or they're
dealing with clients, how do they evaluatethat?
Especially if they don't have the experienceyet to understand this sort of framework or
mindset of will the client remember this in ayear?
(41:34):
Is it actually understood or does it still.
No,
but I would say it's up to myself and ourproject management and our leaders to not put
them in a position to make that kind ofmistake.
So we have to be aware of what they are readyto handle and be able to review and manage what
they're working on to keep them from being ableto make that any large mistakes.
(41:59):
So it, I would say if a new engineer that wasless than you've experienced made a level ten
mistake, well, that's maybe partially theirfault, but it's ultimately on our management
team for putting them in a position where theycouldn't do.
Really interesting how you put that on there.
So, if you're putting it on management orleadership, what are they evaluating?
(42:21):
What are they evaluating or how are theyevaluating?
Is there a metric, to help them understand, youknow, the level of mistake?
Can you remember Dustin help me with theterminology are that, people are promoted to
the level of their incompetence, I think is,is, I think that what I heard once.
(42:45):
I'm not I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Are you are you saying, promoted in spite oftheir incompetence?
No.
They're promoted.
So they're really great at the level of jobthat they are at.
But if they get promoted, let's say into aleadership role or management role, all of a
sudden they are they become incompetent intheir role, even though they could do all the
stuff below.
Yep.
The the okay.
(43:06):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
The capacity component, because you're in aseat that's too big for you, then deter it
deteriorates the quality of what you are.
Your output is, I don't, I don't have a fancierway to say that though.
So that evaluation, right?
Putting someone into a position, if it's up tothe leader, is there a metric or how do you, is
(43:28):
there a way to define that?
There's not a metric or a way to define itclearly that I can think of, but it's more so
that person, the project manager or whoever'smanaging that, that project, that, that new
hire, they should be working closely enoughwith that person to, or that engineer to have a
pretty good feel for what their capabilitiesare.
(43:51):
And then we also have a quality control processwhere our senior engineers are reviewing the
work done by, EITs or, or engineers andtraining.
So, through that process, we should be makingsure that one that expectations are clear that
the, the EIT knows when to ask questions andthat they don't go off the rails in the wrong
(44:16):
direction.
And that their work's being reviewed to makesure we're not putting out any mistakes or very
minimal mistakes, mistakes that don't have alarge impact.
Okay.
So this is a constant evaluation.
This isn't a thing that happens today,tomorrow.
It's a constantly reevaluate it.
Largely.
Yeah.
(44:37):
Because engineers get better over time.
Just like anybody is there in the role more andwork on different types of projects, or it may
be that engineer a is familiar with datacenters.
And they've worked on several data centerprojects and they're really good at those.
And we know that if we keep them on that typeof project, they're gonna do good, consistent
(44:59):
work.
But if we put them on a stadium project thatthey've never worked on before, we're gonna
have to watch them very closely and make surethat they understand what they're doing and
what they need to do.
So a lot of it comes back to knowing your teamand what they're good at and what what their
strengths are.
When do you think that that becomes reality?
(45:19):
We obviously we talked about when you're at alarge company, there's more specialization in
role.
Right?
Like that's that's that's piece of it.
So as a small company, a lot of hats.
Okay.
So when when do you see some more of thatchange to that special, Jason?
Like, hey.
Like, you are, you know, the head of datacenters.
You're the head of stadiums or you're the youknow, like, when when does that essentially
(45:42):
organization or accountability chart startbecoming more real?
So right now we're at 13 people.
I think each year as we grow, we're kind ofreevaluating that and kind of thinking through
our org chart, kind of how, how we'restructured and makes sense.
And I would say for us, like as we get past 15or up to 16, 18 people, things went, we
(46:06):
probably need to structure things a little bitdifferently.
Cause right now I'm able to still stay involvedwith most projects and have a handle on most
everything we have going on.
But we're, but that's getting less and lesseach year and more is being delegated to our
project management team.
And whereas a year and a half, 2 years ago, weonly had 2 project managers, myself and our VP.
(46:29):
Now we've got 5.
So things are getting spread out more.
And, and as we grow, it'll keep getting thatway where things are being distributed more
workload is being distributed more, amongstmore people.
So yeah, I think it's something that is, ascompanies grow, you have to evaluate and see
what makes sense at that point in time.
Because what we're doing now may not be goodenough in 2 years, we may have to do things
(46:55):
differently or we will be doing things.
Yeah.
So then when you have your strategy meetings,that becomes, top concern.
What about yourself?
Right?
Obviously when you started, you were thedefinitive doer.
Like, you did everything.
You did it all.
Now 13 people.
So now that there's a lot more, we call it thebusiness side, right, not the service execution
(47:17):
side, but, like, the, Hey, I have to run abusiness.
Like, what does that kind of balance look likenow for you?
Yeah.
So kind of along the same lines every year, Ithink I'm doing less production engineering.
At this point, I'm doing very little productionon projects.
It's more coordination on projects, review ofprojects, talking strategy, big picture
(47:37):
approaches, and then also the sales andbusiness development and, overseeing all the
other aspects of the business.
So that's, I've learned that I enjoy the bizreally enjoy engineering, but also really enjoy
the business side of things.
And I like both, which is great because Idon't, I don't think it could be easy to just
(47:58):
want to stay doing engineering and put off allthe business side of things.
But there's a few things I don't enjoy doing,but for the most part, enjoy business aspects.
And, but that's something too that we're tryingto offload or not offload, but help set up
different people to help out more in differentareas, whether it be estimating or our office
(48:21):
managers taking a big role in a new softwaresystem.
We're trying to set up for proposals for CRMfor 25 and it's great to have additional people
on our team to count on to help move thoseefforts forward.
Because there used to be a time when if Iwasn't working, nothing happened with the
business.
That was a big step.
(48:41):
Once we had a couple employees, it kinda hit meone day.
Like I went on a site visit or something andit's like work is actually being done right now
while I'm not in the office doing it.
And that was, pretty cool.
It's cool feeling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
This has been, this has been really great.
We have one more question though, that we, wantto ask you.
And now that we know you're an avid listenerand you probably know what's coming, but
(49:04):
nonetheless, we'll ask it anyways.
Tyler, if you could go back 20 years, whatadvice would you give yourself?
Oh, maybe you didn't know it was coming.
I think you did though.
Maybe I didn't think about it enough.
Yeah.
Perhaps.
I guess trust the process and know that as youalways keep improving and know that if you keep
doing that, it'll work out, I guess, and keeplearning.
(49:26):
Yeah.
Well, you're doing a lot of the right stuffbecause obviously, the accolades and the growth
definitely shows it.
So kudos to you, and keep keep it.
Keep, improving and, trusting the process.
Good, good advice.
We're gonna throw all social stuff and all thatfun stuff in the show notes.
But if somebody wanted to get ahold of you,what's the best way for them to do that?
(49:46):
LinkedIn works or email's great, but I'm activeon LinkedIn.
That's probably the easiest place to find meand reach out.
Okay.
That works.
And then, is there anything else you'd like totell people before we say our goodbyes?
Thank I think we've about covered it.
So I appreciate you guys having me
on the podcast.
I really enjoyed it.
Okay.
Cool.
Listeners, this is, Tyler Cease, founder of SSEor Southern Structural Engineers.
(50:12):
Right?
That's right.
Right?
So
that's Steel engineers.
Steel.
Wow.
Structure and steel.
We talk too much about steel structure.
Southern Steel Engineers.
And, until next time.
Adios.
Thanks for listening to Building Scale.
To help us reach even more people, please sharethis episode with a friend, colleague, or on
social media.
Remember, the 3 pillars of scaling a businessare people, process, and technology.
(50:38):
And our mission is to help the AEC industryprotect itself by making technology easy.
So if you think your company's technologypillar could view some improvement, book a call
with us to see how we can help maximize your ITcybersecurity strategy.
Just go to building scale dotnet/help.
(51:01):
And until next time.
Keep building scale.
Scale.
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