Another successful trawl in the eng-tips forum has led me to this old thread from 2006. Link
One of my aspirations is to start my own company someday, so I was wondering if anyone wanted to share some of their more recent stories of how they got started.
I enlisted in the Navy right out of high school. I spent 6 years splitting atoms, boiling water, and pushing electrons for Uncle Sam. Got out and went to school, knocking out my BSCE in three years. I worked 20-30 hours per week at an environmental engineering firm while I was in school, remotely helping their out-of-state structural division when I could.
When I graduated, the structural firms were not hiring at all. So I got a job with a sign company designing foundations, poles, and connections to be checked/corrected/approved by an outside consultant. After 3 months I designed a spreadsheet to do my entire job for me. After another 3 months I convinced a structural firm looking for a senior engineer to interview me. I started two weeks later.
I worked there for a bit over 5 years, getting my license along the way. I was giving an extraordinary amount of trust and latitude with interfacing with clients (too much, really), and I was bringing in work before I had a license. I brought in a steel mill and did a couple projects for them. Their engineering manager decided he liked me and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. The consulting firm had no hopes of matching it, and they were reasonable so I left there on good terms.
I spent 6 months at the mill before COVID hit. I wasn't essential for mill operations, so I was sent to work from home. I started picking up side jobs then, and after 6 months the side job was too much. The management at the mill changed, and while they were great and we got along, it was clear their new vision for how things would work wasn't going to fit what I wanted, so we parted ways amicably.
I took my part time side gig and turned it into a full time job. I'm still doing it 3.5 years later. I'd like to expand, but the fates seem bound and determined to thwart those attempts. So I'm just keeping on keeping on. Designing mostly high end residential and some small commercial.
Worked for a restoration contractor until I was about 25. Decided working for non-technically inclined people wasn’t quite for me so started a construction company. Pounded on doors to get whatever concrete sub work that I could and used the downtime early on to create my estimating spreadsheets (since I was estimator, project manager, labour, and work procurement). My brother and I went partners on the venture. We were both living in a house we bought together a few years prior, and he was working as an engineer. So the deal was that in exchange for me not contributing to the mortgage for a period, he would retain ownership in the business. Worked out and after about 5 years he came on full-time.
After a period of grueling sub work we tried navigating the GC restoration market, and got some rather unique / highly technical projects, which was wonderful. But on the typical stuff we grew tired of the people quite quickly and noticed that the grease one has to supply to make it in that game was not for us.
Luckily two things happened. One, a metal trade on a project worth about 300k (large enough to matter to us) made us so angry that we decided to do the metal fabrication ourselves going forward. We were holding up buildings with structural steel and these clowns torched or plasma’d single pin connected rakers with up to 1/2” variation from the bolt size (1mm tolerance in our code), and they defended the practice. I nearly ran them over with the bobcat.
The second lucky thing that happened is we tweaked the formwork design from the one our construction engineer gave us. Instead of working with us (because we had good reason to make the changes) he blasted us to heck. When we got him to describe why he started drawing moment and shear diagrams that made no sense for the application, and I similarly got so pissed that I decided to finally get my license (I think around 30ish). My brother was licensed at the time so in a week we got a COA and did the design under his seal.
So long story short…we now do metal and construction engineering because the people that used to do that for us really were unpleasant to work with. And it has been much better to us than breathing in concrete dust.
If I have to summarize why this has worked out it would be because we minimized risk by not requiring large amounts of capital at any one period. If the company fell flat early on, no problem since we could cover the mortgage. Later if it falls flat, no problem, we have reserves to cover us for a downturn. Not being in dire need of money is a perquisite to sleep and I recommend it to you. So starting out on your own I would suggest that you build some cash reserves and potentially start from side work (as phamENG did) before going full monty.
I'll add that those 5 years were nearly the equivalent of 10-15. Our office of 6-7 engineers was cranking out up to 600 projects per year. We did everything - wood, steel, concrete, masonry, historic restoration, waterfront and coastal structures. I'd be crawling under a mobile home one day to assess its anchorage, and then walking the pier of a port terminal the next to observe pile driving on a mooring facility I designed for 60t ocean going cargo ships. It was a trial by fire with lots of exposure to a lot of things. It was really good for helping me realize that, no matter how much I learn, I really don't know much.
Enable touches on a couple important points - partnership and capital. Both are very important. I tried to get one of my peers to come with me to form a partnership, but he declined. Things would look a lot different if he had come with me. Going from one to two is one of the hardest steps you can take. For me to add another person to my payroll, I need to nearly double my work volume, which is a huge risk - if that person doesn't work, I'm stuck with way more work than I can conceivably get done on my own. Alternatively, I have to have the capital set aside to cover their pay and benefits (and other associated overhead) until they are up to speed and then I gradually add work. Either way, it's a lengthy and challenging process.
One of the greatest (and worst) things about engineering consulting and design is that you really don't need a lot of capital. Enough to manage the risk of failure, yes, but the business itself doesn't need much. If you have a reputation and clients that like you, you can work out of your house with a laptop in a lot of situations. Of course that also means that when it's time to retire, very few engineering firms have any actual value to be purchased...but as long as you know that going in and plan for it, it's not a big deal.
thanks for your insights, I always find it interesting when someone with a military background transitions out and picks up a regular job. From the service people I know, they have a broad knowledge base and are generally well rounded in terms of their skill set.
We’re quite similar with regards to experience from what you describe. Certain,y I found myself in more of a client facing role than my peers, which has always been a positive for me.
Out of interest why do you think you struggle to expand your business?
I think if I committed to starting a business I would treat it purely as a mechanism to generate an income as opposed to a company of size with a perceived financial ‘value’, when the true value is in the knowledge/ capability of the employees.
your story is great, I admire the spirit of ‘getting things done’ but also by the sounds of things covering your work with the technical backing.
Not many companies here in the UK have the stomach to undertake both the design and construction side of projects, but the few I know who do seem to be very successful. I guess this is down to being able to manage the quality of the final work yourselves.
I dropped out of high school and started in the trades. Completed an apprenticeship. At my company, there was a sole practitioner engineer that stamped our shop drawings. I heard from my bosses how much they liked him, how he charged lots of money, but he was practical and they appreciated it. They had spent decades before they found him dealing with impractical engineers that didn't understand their specialist trade.
This engineer was a quirky guy, drove a porsche 911 and worked remote from hawaii for 2 months every winter.
So off to engineering school i went, with the intent of becoming this guy.
And more or less, that guy i did become.
After engineering school, worked a few different jobs, both in general structural and in specialty structural. With a vision of starting my own practice in the niche, once licensed.
got licensed, hung my own shingle pretty much the next day.
its been 4 years, loving it, making great money.
Still no porsche (though i could afford one). & no remote work from hawaii. though do work remote ~7 weeks per year, while visiting mine and my wifes separate families which are both on different corners of the globe.
year one 1 and 2 of private practice I made 2x my old salary, year 3, 5x, and year 4, 7-8x. (though the tax-man definitely takes his cut!!)
These interest rates are really starting to bite the industry. we will see how much things dip this year, but i cant ever imagine they could get so bad that i would have to go back to looking for a dayjob.
Not much to contribute here myself other than these kinds of threads are why I love this board. I love hearing all your stories on how you started your business or how you are working in it today.
Thank you, OP, for starting another one. I, like you, hope to do similarly one day.
1) Going from 1 to 2 is the hardest step in hiring. I touched on it above. Without some really well defined, systematized workflows in place it's hard to bring on somebody with limited experience and train them while maintaining enough work to pay everyone. And people with a lot of experience are expensive.
2) Wavering personal expectations. On the one hand, I'd love to grow my business. I enjoy business development, meeting clients, solving their problems. But I also enjoy time with my family (I have two young kids) and the flexibility that comes with only having to manage my own time. Lately I've been gravitating more toward taking less work and spending more time with my kids. They'll only grow up once, and I'd rather be there for that. I make enough money - more is nice, sure, but at what cost?
(Number 2 drastically reduces my motivation to solve number 1. So while I'm still chipping away at it to reduce my own stress, it's a slow process.)
I tried hiring. The fellow was the perfect candidate on paper, and had a lot of great qualities.
Though in the end, nobody cares about your business as much as you do.
I found that i was spending more time with him/on him, than i would have spent if i just did his work myself. potentially thats a "me problem".
anyway, less stress, and the going is good now for me as a 1-man.
i would like to take on a new grad in the future at some point, and give back, the same way older engineers gave back to me when i was training under them.
After getting my BS and MS, I went to work for a largish regional civil consulting firm. Spent most of the first year+ as a resident project representative, which was good experience. Gradually worked into more structural design, got my PE after about 2.5 yrs. Left that company about 6 months to a year later to join a guy I'd been in grad school with and we started our own structural firm.
We had a few ups and downs but we grew to 15 employees before the big recession hit, then shrunk back down to 5. That was a rough time but we made it through and grew back up to 11 before I sold my remaining shares and "semi-retired" last year to teach at the local university (my alma-mater). Our firm was busier during Covid than we'd been before it hit.
I stuck with my old firm for about 6 months, extremely part time, but we mutually decided that it was probably better for me to just go out on my own. So I'm a one-man shop now in addition to teaching a couple classes each semester (which is enough to get me benefits - health insurance for the family). I say "semi-retired" but I've probably been busier now than I was for the last few years with learning the ropes at the university plus the various other things going on this year. I haven't been doing too much consulting but I figure after this year I'll have a better handle on teaching and more time available to consult. Plus this summer I'll be just consulting, though I plan to make it considerably less than 40 hr/week. I'm really enjoying the change of pace and being at the school. I figure after a year or so I'll have a lot more free time while still making enough income, which was one of my main goals.
I'll probably be content to stay as a one-man shop rather than deal with having employees and get into all that, but I have the opportunity to see who the best students are if I should want to hire an intern...
Having hired a few people over the years, my philosophy is that it's easier to train someone in the technical stuff if they have the right personality, attitude, are the right fit, etc. than it is to teach someone to be the right fit, attitude or deal with clients well, etc. Most engineering graduates are fairly good at learning technical stuff. But they need to be someone that's enjoyable to work with (not that you don't want the smartest one that fits those criteria). By best students I don't necessarily mean the best number crunchers. Sometimes the really good number crunchers are too trusting of the numbers (idealized models).
I agree with you and @phamENG. That first hire is the toughest. You're doubling the workforce. It's tough to get the workload in until you have that person but it's scary to get the person without that workload. Although if the new employee is an intern (EIT/FE) you don't necessarily need twice as much work, since they won't be as productive as you. Like you were saying, it takes a lot of your time to train them. But unless you're willing to spend that time you never get the advantage of having them get up to speed and help you out.
This has been a great read! My story is less interesting than the ones above, but I'll share. I basically worked for the same engineering company for 19 years after college, being a big part of the company expanding more into structural work. That company was eventually acquired by a larger one a couple years before I left, as they wanted to offer structural engineering as one of their services.
Aside from my engineering job, over those years I bought and renovated a duplex and did occasional side work as a carpenter. The duplex, despite being bought at exactly the wrong time (in 2006) has finally paid off, giving me enough passive income to make starting my own company a much lower risk than it would have otherwise been. The carpentry and construction work that I've done both for myself and for others has made me a better structural engineer as I'm always thinking about how I would construct one of my structural designs.
Upon leaving my employer, I decided that I would take the next year and a half off to specifically study structural engineering and write software. This also happened to coincide with an 18 month non-compete I had with my former employer, so the timeframe seemed to make sense. I saved enough before I quit that I knew I'd be ok financially, especially considering the passive rental from my duplex as well as another property that I manage for a friend.
I've only been in business for 5 days now, so I don't exactly have a ton of perspective, but I think this is going to be good. This is a great profession for starting your own business. The start-up costs are extremely low if you'll be working out of your home. In case anybody's curious, I'm estimating about 10-12k for the first year, but I think somebody could probably be operational for 5-6k. Some things that I paid more for make sense to me, like not using the cheapest insurance company.
When I was working for somebody else my duties included: discussing projects directly with clients, determining engineering fees, writing agreements, receiving signed agreements, designing and drafting plans, stamping plans, and providing construction services. Now that I work for myself, there isn't much additional stuff to do, mostly just accounting/billing and some minimal administrative tasks. One huge benefit for me is not being excessively pestered about meeting some arbitrary utilization ratio, or having to deal with the fact I had 1 hour of overtime which wasn't approved.
I say when you're ready OP, go for it. Put yourself in a good position financially beforehand so it's as low risk as possible. Ideally, you don't ever want to be in a position where your back is against the wall and you're forced to take on a bad project or client that you'd otherwise run from.
One of the other benefits of being on your own is that when you need a new computer or software application you just buy it, rather than having to go thru 47 layers of justification and battle the IT dept.
one of the reasons i even went into engineering as a profession, before even signing up for engineering school, was i saw how easy the start up is, and how low the startup costs are.
it also helps that most engineers arent very business driven, and arent overly personable. So if you have an ounce of entrepreneurialism, and are personable enough to get along with architects/builders, the grass is pretty green
Understandably there's a lot of civil and structural people here, but every location and branch of engineering is different and you need to also recognise, quite a bit is luck and timing and being in the right place at the right time. You don't hear so much for those for who it didn't work out.
For me, I was a 25 year company man in Oil and gas engineering, multiple different projects and types of projects so never got bored with just churning out the same stuff time and again, but got tired of the office politics and the issues with what started as a smallish consultancy being taken off and subsumed into a much bigger organisation. So left for a start-up which was ok for three years until the oil price slide of 2014/15 when all projects either stopped or were not replaced when they finished.
No one was hiring full time employees so went into the contract game starting my own company, which is a tried and tested option in the O&G world. Managed to get a 6 month contract at the company I used to work at and most initial work comes from people you already know in the main. That work is still gogin on 10 years later, but with a few extra jobs tacked on.
I pondered about 20years ago starting a company with four or five others, but it's very hard to leave the reliability of a monthly pay cheque, pensions, benefits etc for a leap into the unknown. Worked for me, but then I had some resources by then to last at least 12 months without having to really look for a job. Also I was being "let go" so there wasn't the option of staying anymore....
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
I'll keep it short and simple:
- Went to study engineering, loved structural engineering, decided to become a structural engineer
- After graduation worked for contractor/builder (finding a structural engineering role was very difficult), then eventually got a job as a structural engineer.
- First 5 years as a structural engineer is like a honeymoon period. Lots of learning, lots of new things. Was not paid well compared to project managers or those in other industries but liked what I was doing, thought money and better things would come later.
- Worked for various firms and developed my craft.
- 10 years in the industry, still waiting for money and better things, also added work-life balance on my list.
- 15 years in the industry and still waiting/hoping.
Then one day I realised that:
- The only one looking out for you is you.
- Life is short, embrace uncertainty and take risk calculated risk.
Soon after I took the leap of faith......glad I did. Working for myself has been an amazing journey so far (probably the best part of my career), learned so much about people, business, and other things that one wouldn't be able to experience unless they run their own business.
However, it is not all sunshine and rainbows and its defintely not for everyone. I know of several people who went on their own but weren't able to make things work. Going on your on, alone, means you have to do everything not just engineering (client management, accounting, advertising, strategy, IT, etc.) and trust me sometimes its a struggle.
