When Andrew Steeves stepped up to the podium to address a group of young professionals employed in the consulting engineering industry, he opted to focus on the basics of building a successful firm.
ST. ANDREWS, N.B.
When Andrew Steeves stepped up to the podium to address a group of young professionals employed in the consulting engineering industry, he opted to focus on the basics of building a successful firm.
“When I was putting together this presentation, I tried to remember what I needed to know when I was your age,” said Steeves, a corporate strategic adviser at Fredericton-based ADI Ltd.
A professional engineer with more than 30 years’ experience in corporate planning, quality management, human resources management and benefits administration at ADI, Steeves covered a range of topics in his 90-minute presentation, touching on everything from finding business and making money to potential career paths and even procurement.
He told some 20 young engineers attending the national convention of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies-Canada that a basic tenet is that a consulting firm exists to provide professional design services for clients at a profit for the company’s owners.
“As a business, your company will not survive without clients,” Steeves said.
“To win clients, you must discover their needs, wants and desires and meet those needs with services that meet their criteria of quality, schedule and price.”
Steeves, who previously delivered parts of the presentation to a group of young engineering professionals in Manitoba, said marketing is based on certain key principles, which in turn correspond to career paths for young professionals.
Potential career paths are: technical expert, responsible for the content which clients seek; project manager, responsible for the delivery of the content; the marketing champion, responsible for discerning clients’ needs and matching services; and the business manager, responsible for running the enterprise.
“Early in your career, you can easily change paths,” Steeves said. “You can often straddle two or three paths. But you will find it beneficial to understand the key drivers of all the paths.”
Steeves, who has a master’s degree in civil engineering and an MBA from the University of New Brunswick, said the paths of technical expert and project manager are covered “quite well” at most engineering schools and technical colleges.
“However, the paths of marketing champion (finding business) and business manager (making money) are the focus of continuing education courses and business associations such as ACEC.”
Regardless of their chosen career paths, young professionals need to have a basic knowledge of how consulting engineers make money as well as recommended best practices for retaining consultants, Steeves said.
‘This is something you should be aware of,” he said in reference to the InfraGuide best practice for selecting a professional consultant, which recommends qualifications-based selection.
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