[Music]
Thank you George for that nice introduction.
I didn't realize this when we first asked Kord to be a lecturer,
but we're at 10 years now. It's been a fast 10 years and I want to thank
George and Sandy for helping every year for coordinating and putting it all together.
But you know, it's been exciting for Schnabel, hopefully
the university's enjoyed it. You've brought some great speakers over the years and
we're happy to continue this tradition and hopefully this is another
fine example I'm sure we'll be reporting.
Schnabel is approaching its 60th anniversary. That's a long time for a consulting
geotechnical engineering firm in this industry.
So we started out in the Washington D.C. area. We now have about 18
offices, mostly throughout the eastern part of the United States
but we work throughout the United States and around the world.
Another kind of unique thing is over about the last decade we've probably
worked in about a 100, 120 countries so it's been a pretty
exciting time for us both from growing geographically as well
as growing our services over the last 60 years to
include not only geotech and salting and foundation
recommendations but also significant geoscience
capabilities and underground engineering resources.
So we're now about 300 people. I want to point out our little tagline here on the bottom.
We started trying to think about you
know what kind of represents what we try to accomplish and that built better
together really struck us as being an indication
of both our internal capabilities we're
able to bring all those unique underground engineering capabilities
together to solve some really challenging projects.
We're also able to work closely with our clients and help them become successful
so by working together internally and with our clients i think
we've been able to be very successful in the last
six decades or so and we're looking forward to many more.
so i think that's what you learned as a civil engineer
is that we are the ones that help bring these teams together and solve problems
so take that message from your education here and make sure you implement that
throughout your career. So with that, that's probably a good segueway
to move on to our key speaker here thanks for joining us today i think
today's guest is going to be a really enlightening
speaker i've had a pleasure working with him now for a while
this lecture really looks to bring a representative of the civil
engineering design and construction community
to you has had a significant impact throughout our practice in our
profession industry experts come to share
experiences and insights gained throughout their careers they
further try to provide a little bit of a recognition of what's happened what's
changed throughout their careers and also what might be coming forth
for your career as you enter the profession um
you're going to have to recognize what it looks like in the end here
so i look forward to seeing what you're able to accomplish
So our 10th engineering lecture is going to be Dr. Kord Wissmann,
he's a fellow Hokie and also a very good friend of mine,
happy to have you here. Dr. Wissmann got his PhD at Virginia Tech in 1995
and with a couple other stops he's been president and chief engineer for
geo gear for about the last 16 years he's quite a humble guy and wasn't
willing to give me too many details of his numerous career
accomplishments but i've witnessed his tireless work
throughout our profession for the last couple decades and uh he's
currently the president of the geo institute of asce and working
with him over the last couple years many years that i've seen his impact
both at advancing a lot of the community
activities within the organization and
for years to come. So with that I'm going to welcome Dr. Wissmann.
[Applause]
It truly is an honor and a privilege to
be back here it's always great to be back
uh in blacksburg uh blacksburg is a home for me i've been here
lived here for 15 years of my life so it really is coming home
and what a privilege it is to be speaking in front of you today
uh civil engineering students and how many students here are
are in civil engineering who's who's a civil engineer just about everybody
how many folks do we have here that are not students
not students okay not students in the front okay
thank you for coming and any non-civil engineers
one non-civilization here welcome doing missionary work those
civil engineers thank you very much um so it's really nice to be with you today
the title of my talk today is uh i think it's
entrepreneurialism so this thing works
there we go and civil engineering and uh so that's
kind of a mouthful at least it is for me so really the title of my talk is
something more like this how come they don't have any startups
for me right how come as a civil engineer you
know where are the startups in our in our business and maybe what can i do
about it as my career meaning your career
progresses so that's really what we want to talk about today but before we get
there i want to say a few words about schnabel
engineering because in looking into gordon's company
and steve's company and walters company and
and ellen's company you know this is a pretty neat place novel engineering was
founded by a guy named the name schnabel didn't just come
off the internet right it's fine founded by jim schnabel
and he was 26 years old when he founded this company 26
years old that's not that much older than most of
the people in the room and he he started from his garage his
wife joan was his receptionist and accountant he
hired his first engineering employee when he was
30 he started construction observation testing when he was 31
at 38 he led the formation of an industry trade group
that brought the industry together and made everybody better and
allowed us to buy insurances and those kinds of things
he started branch offices and when he was 44
environmental consulting services right after that
he had one job where in richmond virginia where he saved a half a million
dollars by going with double build caissons
this guy innovated with ground improvement solutions when he was 55
years old geophysics when he was 57 and when he
was 58 maybe his greatest accomplishment ever
because he hired allen k okay and and that's what allen looked like i
think sort of look at the hair i mean he's got a lot of hair you got a
lot here now but you had a lot of hair back then
a little kind of trump yeah there you go okay
and you know that was pretty and they didn't have color photography back then
so they actually have black and white photo
okay so continuing 59 blacksburg virginia office with steve here
and then he sold the company to his employees
when he was 60. wow now what do you call jim schnabel
what's another name for jim schnabel now this guy was an entrepreneur right i
mean this guy could get things going and start so we're going to be talking
about you know what it's going to be like for us
to be jim schnabel so who here who here wants to be like jim how many people
here want to be like jim right just about all a lot of us right a
lot of us want to be like jim right we want to do
a start-up we want to be associated with something that's
pretty great and strong and it's going to change the world when we think about
startups think about the kinds of companies you
think when you think about a startup what do you think about craig what do
you think about when you think about a startup what
comes to mind first excitement something new
something new okay these are the things that come to my mind
living in san francisco right they're all in san francisco and they're all
like staffed by people they'll live in these lofts and they eat pizza
and they live on shoestring budgets and and they're
living the tracing of their dreams and they're trying to get some of that
venture capital cash right to go ahead and fund themselves for a little while
while they're funding their dream and if they're really lucky right doing
an ipo later on you know and and being a pretty great
wall street guy right that's what these startups and these are
our colleagues right these are the folks in it
and they're getting this kind of stuff and wha what about
us how come we're left behind
so the real question for us today is how come
there aren't any startups for me
so if you're if there aren't any startups for me if you believe that
that in our profession there doesn't tend to be a lot of startups for me the
question for us is well why not and what can we do about
it in our in our profession as civil engineers and
but before we get that let me ask you what do you want to do in your
career how many people are going to go to grad school half of
you all are in grad school how many people are in the grad school
are going to go to grad school okay about half well most of the group
good how many people after graduate school are going to go
into academia i know i talked to a couple last night
right who's going to be in academia academic right academic
some of us okay academic skills we've got grad school we've got academia
how many people then think they're going to do some kind of government service
d.o.t uh a uh d.o.t let's see corps of engineers
something like that who wants to do that kind of work
usually some of us will do some government service it's a nice way of
life for us well how about construction anybody want
to do construction a couple people want to do construction
great and most of us though most of us are going to do some kind of engineering
consulting so we're going to come out of here and
we're going to work for an ae company for a consultant like that
but it doesn't matter which one of these you are because no matter which
one of these categories of people you're going to be
you're going to need to get a diverse set of skills
that's going to propel your career and it's not just the technical skills that
you learn right here at virginia tech so let's take a
a catalog of that the kinds of skills that
you're going to need to have when you get out of here you know you're going to
need those technical skills and luckily for me
and luckily mostly for you as you get that right here at virginia tech and
nobody can give you that better than what you get right here
as a hokey and everybody knows you got to be able
to talk to people and you got to be able to write
and you got to be able to communicate and everybody knows that so you need
some technical skills and you need some people skills right
because you got to interact with people and what you're going to find is if
you're a army of one then you get no leverage in your career
but if you're an army of lots of people and you can get people to
come along with you you know tom if you can get bernardo to
help you out right then you're bigger than just tom right
you're bigger when you have people who come along with you
in your career but then you also need some business skills
and the business skills that you kind of don't think about these are things like
business development and finance organizational behavior and sales
and that's really what we're going to talk a little bit about today
because these are the things that you probably don't get covered much unless
you're doing an mba or something like that
okay so is it right with us if we have a little fun with this presentation
everybody okay with that all right so these skills now
these skills are going to be pretty tough to get in your career
they're hard they're not easy their skills of life
it's like being here in grad school grad school is not so easy
right and and it's going to be kind of hard but it's not the hardest thing
hardest question you'll ever face what can you think about what the hardest
question is that you will ever face alex what's
the hardest question you think you'll ever face
a major decision in your life we all think of think about the hardest
decision that you're going to face i'm going to
tell you the hardest the hardest question
i ever get the one that fills me with fright
and terror and it's this one does this dress make me look fat
right
i don't know what to say i'm usually a pretty good communicator
but this stops me dead in my tracks i'm not gonna there's
a corollary to this too you know on the other side of the gender equations
you know do i look alright in my new swim trucks no no i don't i don't want
to be answering these questions so so whatever
you do in your career it's not going to be as tough as this
and we're going to talk about some of the skills so this is what we're going
to talk about here for the rest of the half an hour or so we have left okay
some of the things that they didn't teach me and they're probably not
teaching you right now um as you go through grad school and
then we're going to get into why aren't there any startups for me
and then from there we're going to talk about some of the ingredients that
you can put into your career whether you're an entrepreneur
or you're not an entrepreneur but you can make your career more
entrepreneurial and lastly we're going to figure out how
to answer the hardest question ever
okay so first i'm going to tell you just quickly about my career not because i
want to spend much time on this we usually do this in another lecture
but only so you can see how i got to where i got to so
30 years ago i'm sitting in your chair right sitting here i was a cadet
like you and i was sitting in yours here and i had to kind of see what i'm going
to do and i had some great mentors and mike duncan said you got to go to
grad school which i did and in grad school i had some pretty good mentors
and professor mitchell was my advisor he's sitting right here
and i remember asking him this question i said professor
do you remember this okay i remember this okay
professor mitchell i was i was graduating and i had to pick one of
these great firms to work for us professor
mitchell which one of these companies should i go work for
and this was his answer you want me to help you decide which
firm to join they all look pretty good i don't know i don't this is the
smartest man on the berkeley campus right and he has no idea which firm but
but really what he was saying to me at the time i didn't quite get it was
he could not differentiate one firm from the other they all looked pretty
good to him and we're going to come back to
that concept of differentiation here of the kind of
service offerings that you're going to do in your career
later on
okay i spent four more years at two engineering companies did a lot of great
engineering and field work nice big projects i learned the golden
rule and the golden rule you think is something about
you know i don't know what it is but the golden rule that i learned was
he who has the gold makes the rules and what i learned at that point was
in your career as you go forward the closest the closer you can be
to the decision makers that are making the call and hold the money the
more powerful you're going to be in terms of
driving your career forward okay spent four more years here at
virginia tech working for professor phils
that was pretty terrific and then four more years in consulting
and i learned during this four more years of consulting
the answer to this question how do you go
get great projects to work on because i was working on these kinds of
projects and i had to figure out how to bring
them in to the company so how do you get to work on these kinds of
great projects the answer to that question was go find
some and go get them because i found out in
my career at that point in time that i had to bring in the great project
myself for me to work on i learned at that point that selling
your ability to do work becomes an important part
of your career cycle as you go forward
four years later my life changed and my life changed because then i
joined a startup company even though i didn't know it so this
company was a startup it was this geopara thing was invented
by this crazy guy dr fox and he had this design build
delivery system and for these deep these specialty foundations and nobody did
that at the time and he hired me to be as chief engineer
we were two people i was number two and three years into that job
that company was sold and when that company he
he kind of cashed out he did really well when he's when the company was sold
i was still employee number two they needed somebody to run the company
and they asked me to do it and i thought at that time wait a minute i'm a
technical guy right i'm the chief engineer
i've been trained to be a civil engineer how am i going to run
a company like that but i did this by hiring lots of great
folks mostly virginia tech grads filling myself or surrounding myself with people
i wanted to be like expanded into all kinds of places united
states and latin america and asia in europe created lots of new
ground improvement systems grew the geography the staff and the business
but what they never told me back then and what they never told
each and every one of my friends sitting right next to me
was that 20 years from now or 25 years from now
you're going to be running a company or a division
or a branch office or an operation and all of those ridiculous folks
sitting next to me that had no idea what they're doing
they're all important people now and they actually do know what they're doing
okay so each one of you 20 25 years from now
you're going to be running something and you're going to be in charge
all right so some of the things that you have to learn when you start running a
business well you can learn these things in
places like harvard right and go get an mba and
learn how to run a business and do all of those kinds of great
things and that's going to be great for you
i'm going to share with you two two of the secrets
that they'll teach you at harvard that you can spend
60 thousand dollars a year for two years to get two of the secrets
that they teach at harvard one is about accounting and revenues
and the other one is about business models
the first one secret one number one this is the secret to accounting
dollars in is called income and then there's another name for it and
it's called revenue and the accountants will switch
back and forth between these terms quickly to confuse
you and then dollars spent is called
operating expense and they shorten it to opex so that you don't really know what
they're doing and dollars in minus dollars spent
is dollars made that's also called earnings and profit before tax
okay great and then there's more to it because the evil
government gets involved and they take out taxes
and then minus taxes that's real profit to you
okay so that's the secret to accounting and if you know this accounting right
now you know pretty much everything you need to
know for accounting and running a company now it's not quite as simple as
that but it's really not that much more
complicated than that you do not need an mba degree to go
ahead to learn how to run a business all right
but there is something there's a corollary to this and the corollary is
where do the revenues come from i go back to this equation
this revenue thing is a big deal and where does that come from
so where does it come from where do your revenues come from
come from your clients right they come from your clients and where
do your clients come from do they show up and show up at your door
do they call you because they know you're the greatest engineer there ever
was they call you steve just they call you okay okay
he's got to figure it out right okay well
do they call you do you have to call them
do you have to put some effort into figuring out
how to get these clients to call you you sure do and so one of the lessons that
you have to kind of go through is that revenue generation is really
a people skill it's about your ability to motivate somebody to want to work
with you and want to trade with you and trade
your dollars for their dollars for your hours okay
the second secret that they might teach you at harvard
is a secret of the business model now a business model is
the trade that you would use the type of a trade
to go ahead and make your money it's how you make your money
so for example in construction the trade is we're going to trade
the buildings that we complete for a lump
sum dollar value at the end that's the trade
okay and so you better know how to build that building pretty well
and you got to be able to execute that trade and then consulting
it's a little bit different because in consulting
generally speaking you're going to be trading and most people here are going
to be consultants you can be trading the hours that you
work for the dollars that you get that they
give you hours for dollars okay hours for dollars
now the question for you does the consulting
model of a trade does that feel like you'd what you'd get
with a startup business
craig when you were thinking about that started business back then does that
feel that trading a dollar for an hour is that the
kind of business model that you think is conducive towards a startup business
it doesn't feel that way does it doesn't feel that way where is the entrepreneur
in all of this
so that brings us to the second part why aren't there any startups for me
so what words do we think about when we think about entrepreneurial
what are the words that come to our mind now words that come to my mind are these
innovative fun creative small teams of people
shoestring budgets kind of neat offices like in
cloths and that kind of stuff lots of technology
facebook and snapchat instagram venture capital
and are these things typically associated with our field
no you don't think about these things when you think about going to work for a
civil engineering consulting company so why not and the secret to the answer
to that is to start thinking about why are we
engineers why why are you an engineer
who haven't i called osama why are you an engineer
to be creative okay anybody else want to take a shot at where's joe
joe why are you an engineer
okay work on cool things most of us are engineers because we're problem solvers
right most of us like the problem to solve problems and most of us
are pretty good at math and science and we're not so great at that you know
spelling thing right most of us okay most of us are pleasers most of us
in our heart of heart where we like to please we like to solve
a problem and we like to come home to our client
and say look what i did for you can you pet me
please most of us are like that okay most of us
are not antagonistic and most of us are conflict adverse
most of us most of us are pretty left-brained
logical we're linear thinkers we go from the top
down straight line thinking what's the opposite of left brain and so
there's other folks those are architects right they're right brain
they're creative they they they have things like
love and music and imagination we're not this right
we're this we're this not that
so the first reason why we're not so entrepreneurial is because we don't
really have the brains for it right we're pleasers we're not risk
takers we're not risk adverse and our business model doesn't
necessarily support it geez
well that sounds pretty depressing doesn't it i mean now you know our
bottle's not going to support it we don't have the attributes for what
are we going to do but there is hope because we can learn this stuff just
like you can learn leadership and just like you can learn
communication there is hope so some of the ingredients
that you can use if you want to do a startup company or
merely if you want to put an entrepreneurial spin into the
non-entrepreneurial company that you have
there's lots of ingredients to a successful entrepreneurial company and i
want to talk about three there's more than three
but i want to talk about three here today and the three i want to talk about
are let's see the product and the business model and then i want
to talk about vp and talk about the business
development okay those three things we're going to spend some time on
by the way i love this picture man running a business
all right so let's start with product so every
business has a product right every business
creates something that somebody wants and somebody's going to pay for it's a
ford motor company they got cars they create cars and
that's what you pay for and all is good it can be a physical
item or it can be a service how about us in
civil engineering what's our product
do we produce cars do we produce tangible things
alfonzo what do we do
what's our product
i'll help you our product looks like this
right we produce plans and specifications and reports
and analysis and those kinds of things we produce things
to help other people produce a product so is this a service or
is this a hard product how many people think that this is a
product that we produce plans and specifications the hard product
how many people think our business is more like a service
right it's really kind of both right it's kind of both we have some
kind of product in there and we have a lot of service in there
and so as we become entrepreneurial that's going to be
an important part of what we do
okay so to be innovative we have to start off with a great product i mean
just think about apple they're not making all that money by not
having a great product right they have super products so we need a great
product so what i want to do right now is put our talk aside i'm not going to
speak for a minute and i want everybody in this room
to think of a great product go ahead think about a great product
i want you to really focus really focus concentrate
right now i know you're trying to sleep try
concentrate okay are you concentrating are you focused tommy there
all right who's got one who's got a great product
all right you're gonna say well that's not very fair right because i didn't
give you time i mean you know great products save time
okay but it's really more than that right
it's hard to come up with a great product
why is it hard to come up with a great product
this is hard stuff and the hint is how do we normally think as engineers
right we think on that left side of the brain we think linearly we think top
down we think from here to there and we don't think from there
to here in all points in between
who are the creative people who who uh think of
all kinds of weird stuff right they use their
right side of their brains right and and they are creative and they're
they're the artists and the and the authors
and those kinds of people the right brain acts these are the people
that can come up with great products we tend to be handicapped by our linear
thinker thinking but there are thoughts on
how we can start developing skills as left-brained people to go ahead and
overcome this handicap first of all
dream literally your best most imaginative ideas come
when your brain is still when you're not thinking about anything at all when
you're doing things like rock climbing or bike riding and you're
in the zone or you're sequestered somewhere and
you know that's when your best thinking is
because your creative side of your brain is the subconscious side of the brain
and the subconscious mind cannot be accessed
by the conscious mind you cannot focus on coming up with a great product
because you're using your left side of the brain and your
conscious mind and really it's only the subconscious
mind that's going to be creating that great that's where all
your imagination is and you have to kind of see it like your
subconscious mind is a well it's a really groovy nightclub
and you know you want to get in there but the nightclub's got this big hurley
bouncer you know sitting out in front and you can't get
past him and the more you try to approach that bouncer
the more you're not going to get past him you want to look past
that bouncer and see what's going on inside that nightclub
that's how your subconscious mind works so you reach your subconscious mind
mostly when your mind is quiet and when you're in that kind of
dreamlike state and then the other idea is to go ahead
and develop the crazy humorous side of your brain arts
reading tumor these are all the things on your right side of your brain
one last thought on creativity for products is
start with the end of mind we tend to start here
and project there because we're linear thinkers but if you want to be real
creative you want to start there and figure out what you need what
hurdles need to overcome and work backwards i'll give you an example
in 1970s or so or 30 years ago retaining walls look basically
like this thick concrete wall here that concrete wall was
connected to a big big thick footing down here they
work great they're safe they're super there is no need for innovation because
they work really great don't they but how about
the cost of this stuff concrete's strong but it's also
expensive wouldn't it be great if we could make
that facing thinner and wouldn't it be really neat if you
could get rid of that concrete footing and it would still be
stable and so you know that would be something
great to get to now it turns out that in the 1960s an
engineer called henri vidal he actually got there and he invented
msc wolves it actually had been that been around for some years before him
but he really perfected this art and he put these
reinforcing strips back into the soil and he connected those
with reinforcing strips with these thin concrete elements
and when he did that he created a block of stabilized soil
he could get rid of that big honking footing at the bottom
and he made these things great here's here's one in construction
this was actually a site one of my companies
is building and there's the strips coming out the back
side there's a thin facing panel this will be all back filled here
this is what it will look like at the end pretty neat
so there's an example of a civil engineer
being creative using that subconscious mind and creating new
things so it can't be done now how about our
business model our business model we trade dollars for
hours we said earlier that doesn't feel so entrepreneurial
to some of us does this really drive product innovation not so much
because every hour you work you get dollars for and you're supposed to give
your best ideas to your client because he's paying you for it you can't
retain your best ideas because there's no
remuneration for those best ideas in that business model
well that doesn't sound so good but all is not lost because we're in the service
industry in the service industry there's other ways to be entrepreneurial
and to be and to innovate i'll give you an example
coffee in 1980 what a coffee great coffee in 1980 looked like that
okay maxwell house everybody remember mess
blah you know who wants to drink that stuff
right but that's what it was and the corner coffee shops would serve that
and that's all you got in 1980 by 1990 though
in 2000 things looked a little bit different
look like that right now starbucks was better coffee
but it wasn't the better coffee that made starbucks so
unique for most of us it was the other things they had better stuff but they
also had easier access and they created a
customer experience that was unmatched when you go into a starbucks you
feel good so you can be entrepreneurial and innovative not just in the products
that you have but in the way you deliver those products
to the marketplace so there is hope even in our profession
once you have your products and get that all figured out
and your business model now you have to figure out what your vp is so who is
your vp and i i guess that's joe biden right
he's our vp looking pretty good joe everything good
okay well your vp really is your value proposition
so it doesn't stop with products it also you always have to figure out how are
you going to bring your product and your business model to the market
and how are you going to go ahead and create that trade that's value
to your customer let me speak to this if value proposition is a trade it
basically says we're going to give you something for something back it
describes to your customer what's in it for
them give you some examples here's a value proposition we give you
a warehouse shopping experience for consistently low
prices who's that we give you a warehouse shopping space
for low prices there's one right in christiansburg
it's walmart right that's their value proposition
we get you there without any frills for a price
without any frills who is that don't know
that's southwest air right one more two more we bring your family
happiness at the price of our choosing not low
price not medium price the price of our choosing we bring your family
happiness to the price of our choosing anybody know what that is
who is that now if you have kids you know this
that's disney okay that's expensive stuff
how about this one we give you the ultimate driving machine for a
moderately high price everybody knows that that's
bmw right so your value proposition
describes the trade and describes what's in it for your customer
your value proposition in your company whether it's entrepreneurial
or whether it's a traditional company comes from something called the hedgehog
principle the hedgehog principle is something from
jim collin and it is what is it that i can be the best
in the world at it's not what is it that i am the best in the world at
and it's not what is it that i want to be
the best in the world in i'll give you an example
i would like to be the greatest ultimate fighter
i would like to be ronda rousey okay and that's what i wanna be i wanna you know
i wanna be that tough okay but can i get there no
probably not right so that fails the hedgehog principle
and it's not what am i the best in the world at it's what
can i be the best in the world at so the creation of your value proposition
follows that rule
a value proposition necessitates that it has some differentiation this comes
back to professor mitchell's earlier comment when he couldn't
differentiate between the companies think about walmart
and target if target is not differentiated
from walmart right target is just like walmart and you would not be
able to distinguish walmart from target but target is different aren't they they
have a different value proposition what is it
they're red and and they smell that target
smell right you go in there and it smells like everybody knows what target
smells smells like right it's a little bit
different it's a little bit higher end is a different customer experience so
your value proposition has to differentiate for you to be
successful and if it doesn't differentiate in a way
that your customer can understand then your customer is only
going to judge you on price because that's
all he or she has left
your entrepreneurial civil engineering value proposition
should describe your trade in a way that differentiates you from others
i'm going to give you some examples here
we give you a unique service at a low high fair price right that is the
general equation for a value proposition in any
business
we save you time and money while constructing your projects
how many people think that's a pretty good value proposition
how many people think it's not very good right i think it's pretty mundane
right we save you time and money but right
i save your time and money what's he gonna do he's gonna cost you more time
and money right so that's an okay value
proposition but it doesn't give you any
differentiation in the marketplace how about this one
we are your trusted advisors or just stop there we are your trusted advisors
is that a good value proposition
it feels good we want it to feel good but it's easy for others to replicate
and you know that's not so great because we want our value proposition to be our
own value proposition how about this one
we are specialists in cable stayed bridges we've seen it all
we'll keep your projects safe at the lowest cost to you how many people think
that's pretty good yeah i think that's pretty good right it
shows the differentiation it shows what the value is to the
customer and it doesn't try to be all things
to all people
so now you kind of have almost all of the ingredients
of an entrepreneurial business or an entrepreneurial part of a business
figured out you got your product and your you got your
business model and your vp and it's only one thing left and that last thing
is how you relate to your clients and how you go get them
so you get great clients and we said earlier you know you need to get out
there and get them because they're not going to just be coming
straight to your doorstep and you get great
clients through a two-step process it's called need
satisfaction selling i'll talk about this and that is the
art of discovering your clients needs and then going out
and satisfying them and you got to do these things in precise
order you can't satisfy the needs until you really understand
what your clients needs are you have to do it
that way turns out that most people only have two sets of needs luckily for
us only two sets of needs most most of our customers you know what they
are
i should but
allen knows that he doesn't want to give the punch line away
okay good thanks all right good so the first set of needs is your clients
expect that you deliver your product or service well
you deliver your engineering well if you're a
physician you got to deliver your medical service well if you're a lawyer
you got to provide good lawyerly advice if you're a dry
cleaner you got to go ahead and dry clean your shirts well and and
that's pretty good and they expect simply that
you do your job well period and
the issue here though for us as service providers is
there is very little room for differentiation
in this particular step because your clients
can't differentiate what's well and what's not so good when they get
their service for example you get your shirt that's
dry cleaned do you know if it was dry cleaned well
or not you don't know until after you wear it if you're the consumer
of civil engineering products you don't know that that set of plans is
good or not good until after you try it out in the field right
so there's very little differentiation it all looks the same to me
right that's what professor mitchell said right they all look the same to me
i think he was talking about these two or maybe these two i'm not sure
the need number two to satisfy is the need behind the need
and these are the emotions that are that your clients will have
and they're complex and they're kind of crazy and they're things like
acceptance some people want to just be part of the club some people want to
feel safe they want to feel safe particularly
people who work in agencies that reward
safety so you need to provide that to them how about adventure thrill there's
some clients that want to be first out of the shoot
they want to be the early adopters
some people have a need for love and lots of people have a need for
ego lots of us do lots of engineers do and lots of your clients
are engineers right and so you have to figure out
how to kind of make them feel pretty good
and anger and fear and some people have that going on
so client service differentiation is because really being skilled at the
first one delivering a great civil engineering
product while satisfying the need
behind the need good
so figuring this stuff out in your career is going to be hard
but maybe it's not going to be as hard as you think it is
let's do something that's kind of fun let's think about
right now starting our own startup company
and going through this and figuring out how to
figure it out okay so let's start start up some engineering company
and we're first of all going to start on deciding on our product together
and i'm going to give this one to you this is what our civil engineering
consulting company is going to do we're going to be universal consultants
we will take on any project civil engineering or not
okay let's decide on our value proposition
what do you think our value proposition should be for this company that we're
all now starting up right now today
how about something like this we provide our amazing virginia tech engineering
skills on any project right so the value there
is that amazing skills that you get right here
and we're going to provide it anywhere for your dollars
we need a business development strategy and how about something like this we
give our clients exactly the right answer precisely the right answer
and we're going to satisfy the needs behind the needs their emotional needs
at the same time sound good now let's take
all of this and let's apply this to the hardest question ever
and see if we can be successful
does this stress make me look fat it strikes tear fear in my heart
how do we answer that question if we can answer this question
we can be successful in anything that we do as civil engineers
do i look good in my swim trunks let's see if it works
we know our value proposition we use our amazing
virginia tech engineering skills and knowledge to solve any problem
and that we want to seek to understand our customers needs
what do you mean what do you mean why don't you like
this stress
pose our value proposition a way that meets a client's needs i already
know you look great but we can provide amazing engineering to solve that
problem does it sound okay would you pay me money for it okay
and we satisfy the needs and the needs behind the needs
no that dress categorically does not make you look fat
that is how you deliver your engineering product
and close with your unique value proposition we know this because we
provide amazing vt engineering knowledge to suit any project and you have great
confidence in providing the solution because you
know that it's not the dress right it's not the dress it's something
else it's it's not the bathing suit right it's not
the bathing suit so that's how you satisfy the needs and
the needs behind the needs don't be this man
a few party thoughts while we're done for the day
we live in a great profession civil engineering profession
full of wonderful people and you probably know lots of them you know more
than you think you do you know alan professor duncan this is
miriam smith there's alan christopher phils wayne there's ellen
dick handy mitchell there's alan i don't know what he's doing here lots
of great people in a profession you're going to find that
99 out of 100 civil engineers are absolutely fantastic people people
that you want to be with people you can relate to
you exist right now in the greatest profession
of all and lastly your mother was right you will become like the people you
surround yourself with so when you go pick a company and do
whatever you do in life pick your friends wisely and choose a
company based on the people that you'll surround yourself
with that's all i have so i hope i left you in a good spot
not too stressed out not too sleep deprived and i can answer any questions
so we have any questions for dr whitman
i'm just trying to figure out how you managed to get through that bouncer so
well i understand you've got nine or ten
patents lots of sleeping lots of sleep yeah the
brain is just firing all sickness cylinders when
you're asleep
first question
yes sir do you believe that the virginia tech civil engineering program could be
even better off if we had business classes added to the curriculum
is a question should you add business classes to the curriculum or is the
question should you get a business degree
should we add business classes to curriculum yeah you know um
that's an interesting question um i think that if you could
put them in it would be great and the issue that the administrators are going
to have is you know if you put a business class in
what are you going to take out right are you going to take out an
english class finance class or you can take out an engineering class so you can
take an elective a design elective what are you going to take out right and
so i think that the best answer to that is
it's easy to pick up business skills later in life
you can take short courses business skills are pretty easy at least in my
view yup yup and if you surround yourself
with people who have good business skills and you model your
career after them you're just going to learn from them and you're going to be
fine so you don't need to go to harvard yep
now if i could choose my program and i had
five or six years to go to school sure i would love some business courses yep
great question yes sir do you ever feel nervous or wary about joining a startup
company like gtop so do you still feel nervous
about like were you nervous about it when you first
started there yeah yeah was was i nervous about
joining geopower when i when i joined i was really nervous right this
crazy guy he was like everyone's anybody see back to the future
right back he was like the old guy you know and
the crazy professor and i wasn't sure and
though i went to somebody who i value probably first in the world for
professional advice i went to my phd advisor professor phils and i asked
professor phils should i join this crazy whacked out
startup company or should i stay in consulting and his
answer to me at the time was you can always go back to consulting
i think the corollary to that was would be
sometimes you have to take risks in life right sometimes and you know that's okay
you want to make sure you're not going to lose too much
when you take those risks of life but sometimes you got to jump off the diving
board and hope it's water down there in the
pool great question
you do have several patents and i think they came
from solving problems you had a problem you had to solve it
and somehow that inspired the creativity so is the problem solving
linked to the creativity yeah it is professor phil's question is fantastic
because the question is well how about it's that
left side right side link right is it solving problems and creativity how does
that all work together and the way i would answer that is the
solving problems works great and works perfectly the best way
as long as you're solving the problems backwards rather than
forwards so the natural inclination when you're doing anything
is you know i have i have this pointer what else can i do with
it all right and that's kind of going from here and going forward
but the way to kind of get to the handrai of it
all thing is you say where where do i want to get to
i want to get rid of that base well to get rid of the base of that retaining
wall what am i going to have to do i'm going
to make that thing stable right well then how am i going to make
that thing stable i'm not going to be able to make that thing with just this
to make it stable oh i'm going to have to find a way to go
ahead and capture the soil behind it right so i'm going to have so a gravity
reaction with the soil behind it so working
backwards logically in my view works really good and then
the creative step in some of these things
those were usually when sleeping on airplanes you know so you're
half asleep and you're kind of doing this and
you know maybe if you're lucky you have a drink and
you're kind of doing this and all of a sudden you say wow i could do this
and that's when they come to me great question
thank you other questions yes sir lee right
okay uh when you're taking a startup company and uh
you know you have to qualify things as engineers how do you quantify
the creativity factors
how do you evaluate the creativity factor in people when you're looking to
hire people well what a great question question how do you evaluate the
creativity factor when you're evaluating somebody who's going to come work for
you for me personally i don't expect it
right so i just don't expect that people are going to be creative
and i wouldn't hire for somebody to be creative hire somebody to
solve problems really well and and that way and then
it's the occasional engineer that is quite creative
but like i said you don't necessarily have to come up with the next widget
to be creative a creative solution might be
figuring out how to create a customer experience
that's different than nobody else does right
how to deliver your product in a way that tastes and feels and
smells different to your customer than somebody else is is doing that
answer your question i just don't yep great
yes ma'am
so so i'm really deaf i wear these hearing aids my wife says i'm deaf and
dumb so that's why i'm coming back i don't think it's very nice by the way
did you meet any complications while getting your patent
yeah the question is do you make complications when you get uh patents
yeah they're called rejections right so the
u.s patent and trademark office they they're
paid to go ahead and reject your patents and
so um yeah we've met some of those then you
have to overcome those objections and you know then you have to have some
creative thought processes and doing so yeah
sure was that your question those those kinds of objections those kinds of
difficulties yeah okay yeah and why do you want to
have patents let's let's answer that question some people
think patents are evil right patents are evil because it
prevents other people from doing these things and
you hoard all of that to yourself but i don't think so
i think the u.s patent law is developed for a specific reason it's
to give people incentive to go ahead and create things
that are of great value to society that society benefits from
think about the reinforced earth retaining wall society benefits from
that because we pay less for our retaining walls
and vidal had 17 years to go ahead and make some money on those patents and
after 17 years he is forced by the law to give it back to society and everybody
can use it so patents are a way for us to advance
advance our creativity advance our society
they're not they're only a short-term protection for the inventors
nice question thank you other questions
all right i want to thank you i do want to say though that
your last comment there about the emotional needs of the clients
you know you don't realize it but whether it's sales
or solving clients problems or everything when you're talking to them
on the phone you're meeting with them you don't realize how important it is to
recognize their emotional needs and touch on that and that i think is
the difference between success as a consulting engineer and just
struggling to sell ours so i want to make sure that as you're
sitting there in your office you're thinking every day about the
emotional needs of all these wonderful students here
fantastic keep this in mind thank you and i also one other thing
i'll drink joyfully
i'd like to leave you with this plaque it says in recognition of his innovation
and entrepreneurial leadership within the geotechnical and civil
engineering profession great thank you thank you for being our friends
you