 Welcome to this episode of the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. A podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up-to-date on technical trends in the field and also help them to succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilti's North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering from UT Austin. And I'm currently pursuing my MBA at Auburn. I'm your co-host Matt Bacartal. I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers, practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's degree in structural engineering from UC San Diego. Before Matt introduces our guests, I wanted to share some breaking news with you. AMI is excited to announce the launch of their newest podcast on the Civil Engineering Media and Entertainment Network, this week in Civil Engineering, also known as TWICE. TWICE is a 10 to 15 minute weekly audio and video podcast hosted by practicing civil, structural and geotechnical engineers bringing listeners the latest industry news. We recognize that none of us have the time to read up on all of the news we'd like to anymore and soon we won't have to, thanks to TWICE. You can learn more about the show and subscribe when it launches in mid-September at www.twice.news. That's T-W-I-C-E dot news. Now I'd like to introduce our guest for this episode. Ren's Hayes P.E. is the principal at H&O Structural Engineering. He completed both his bachelor's as well as his master's of science in civil engineering at Western Polytechnic Institute. He's a certified value growth advisor and a hands-on leader, leading solution-driven teams with an emphasis on understanding the needs and perspectives of both architects and developers. Ren's believes that it's important to become a lifelong learner as it leads to compounding growth and opportunities. And in his private time he enjoys golf, water skiing, snowboarding, crossfit and a good laugh. Now let's jump into our conversation with Ren's Hayes. Ren's, welcome to the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. Thanks for having me. Perfect. I'm so glad we have you with us today. Before we dive in too much further, can you tell our audience a little bit more about what it is you do on a daily basis at H&O Structural Engineering? Sure. I'll start with a little bit about H&O. We're a structural engineering firm based out of Boston, Massachusetts. And we're focused primarily on mid and high-rise building structures. As a principal at the firm, I was co-founder with Jeremiah O'Neill. My primary day-to-day roles are in honestly HR functions, business development, marketing, and then I handle a lot of the new leads. So I'm doing all of the proposals at this current state. Most of those functions as we scale will be roles that we'll be hiring for over the next several years. And Ren's, I know you're one of the principals in a successful firm. One of the things that I was wondering and what I see a lot in common with principals is they have to have their company values and check their visions for the firm. Can you talk a little bit about having that, maybe setting that out kind of the bigger picture of what it's like to be a principal and trying to get those values out to your firm? Absolutely. So something I think a lot of companies skip, a lot of companies start by when a founder or co-founders, they think that they excel at really executing the day-to-day work, right? And they've developed relationships and confidence that they can deliver that work product. So they go off on their own and they start acquiring clients and they get too many clients, so they have to hire help. They never really thought of it as how do I build an organization that can sustainably grow and continue to deliver value. So what happens when a business starts that way is they kind of get in a hamster wheel. They're always chasing that organizational structure to drive value, but they're kind of caught in working in the business instead of working on the business. So something we really lead with and emphasize a lot is the importance of mission, vision and values. So mission defines why your company exists. This should be extremely short and concise and you want everybody in your company to know what your mission is at the drop of a hat. I would expect that most companies, they have like these long-winded mission statements that talk about like industry leading quality and value and like great team and we deliver this product for an ultimate client experience. But if you asked even just the top 10 leaders of the company, none of them could recite or write down what the mission statement actually is. So it's really just lip service on the wall. It doesn't really impact how the organization runs. So coming back to mission, it defines your why, why does your company exist? So at HNO, our mission is a better experience and we mean that with respect to our team and for our clients. And then our vision paints the picture of where your company is going. A super important piece of that is that you write your vision in the present tense. So you're painting a picture of your company in five years and it's an internal document. It can be extremely long. You want to define the type of work, who you're working with, where your revenue is coming from. But writing it in the present tense, what you're doing as a team is you're collectively agreeing to start acting like that company you will become in five years because the importance you want to develop the expectations and the behaviors of that company you're going to be. That's the only way to get there. The core values, what those do is those guide culture and decision making. You only want three to five values because you want them to be, again, short, concise, such that everyone on your team remembers them. But those really drive that decision making and build culture. So when you think about leading an organization, if you haven't defined why your company exists, where you're going or core values to make decisions on how can you motivate your team and how can you expect them to all make decisions and kind of be rowing the boat in the same direction if you haven't clearly laid that out. Owners and leadership will make inconsistent decisions if they don't have clarity on those things. It's really hard to keep all of that top of mind if it's not something you've headed and make sure is really critical to your organization. Now, I really like that point about having that clear mission and the core values because that is what the company is. I think a lot of probably like middle engineers, like you were saying, you know, they can get their clients, but then they end up working, you know, just getting the stuff out, just getting the stuff out, just getting the stuff out. And I think as an industry, you know, if you don't have that business acumen or that bigger picture having like the vision and the core values, I think it kind of does lead to, you know, having a business that isn't run very well. And I think it contributes to the, you know, how come engineers aren't paid as much as they should? Well, maybe because the bigger picture of like starting a business is are you an engineer or are you a business owner? Are you looking at it as a business owner? Because, you know, one strategy that doesn't seem to work at least in our industry is, you know, lower your prices so you can be the lowest, lowest bid, lowest bid. And then that kind of just drives the whole industry down. So I really think that's great on how you do need to look at it from a business perspective and as a business owner and getting those core values right to have a clear direction for your team. Yeah, we look at like planning and leadership as like, it's one of the, in our perspective, one of the eight core functions of a business. You need to develop a competency in all eight areas. But if you don't have clarity and mission vision values and you don't have a framework and clarity on how you deliver value to a client, you don't really have an organizational structure that's going to allow the workforce to grow and advance their career. There's eventually going to be a ceiling and the limitation isn't on the individuals working in the company. It's limited by the organizational structure of the company. And we see that as a real kind of hurdle in the industry as a whole and that's kind of AECs. Without that organizational structure, it becomes very horizontal, right? In our field, leaders can grow a company to several hundred people without proper organizational structure. And largely because expectations on designing, say a building or a bridge or say a civil site. When you pass that work off to somebody that's capable of doing the work, it's very clear on what the delivery is of that service. So you can grow to several hundred people with really a lack of clarity through an entire organization. But that's where we see that's the leading cause of burnout in our opinion in our industry. And that's why you see people leave architecture and engineering 10, 15 years into their career to other industries because they just the only thing they have to look forward to is a more complicated or larger project. And that really fuels growth for a decade plus. But over time when they realize that's all they have to look forward to and they don't have clarity on how to advance their career, that can be really frustrating and that's really needs to burn out. Absolutely. And those core values serve as such a great road map for really what those core competencies are that you want them to excel in in different roles and in different ways within your company. Wonderful. I wanted to dive into that really quickly before before we continue with some of these questions about about your career and how you've gotten here. But what I'm what I'm really interested in is, you know, you have a bachelor's and a master's in all of this deep technical, structural engineering education. And here you are a business pioneer. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got to this point in your journey? Why it was that, you know, was there something? Was there an event or something in your career where you you sparked a change in interest? Why did you think that this is a place that you wanted to bring your career? Sure. So with an engineering background, I guess I grew up in a family. My family business is a structural steel and miscellaneous iron company. So I was exposed to leading a business early in my career. And after working for a larger firm and getting my engineering license, I actually exited that company to help run the steel company, which exposed me to the many challenges that you face running a business. And at that same time, I I learned the importance of becoming a lifelong learner. I think one of the I don't know who said it, but you'll be the same person you are today in five years other than the people you meet in the books you read. So a big part of my education is I just seek out audio books. I had a commute. I've commuted for an hour to two hours a day for over six years. And I just found like as I face new challenges in running a business, that I should seek experiences from others in the fastest way to do that is through books around those topics, whether that be marketing, sales, emotional intelligence for managing different personalities and understanding people's personalities. And those things really helped round out my business awareness. And actually, as we started to grow that steel business, we were launching the engineering business, Jeremiah and I at H&L. And we found that we had all this knowledge from all these books. And we would try and tinker with these certain areas of each business and try to improve them to get like mediocre results or find other hurdles. And it became really frustrating. It was like, where do we start? And that's where I got exposed to the Certified Value Growth Advisor Program, which is a formal certification in the Mergers and Acquisitions Market. That whole industry really opened my eyes to how businesses were evaluated and how value was perceived in all different areas other than construction and engineering. And in that program, I learned about the eight core functions of a business, all businesses, not just engineering architecture. And those are planning, leadership, sales, marketing, people, operations, finance and legal. And so the important thing is that you maintain balance in all eight of those areas to properly grow a business. The challenge is most businesses are strong in two or three of those core areas. And they're typically blind to the value of the other five areas. So what happens when things get tough is they try to improve and the two or three areas that they're already superior at, which actually hurts. That increases the risk of the actual company relative to their production and size. So that's increasing the company-specific risk, which actually increases their cost of capital. So it really hurts their financial position. But when you build a balanced organization, you really are stable for the size company you are and you're well poised to have intrinsic value. And when I say intrinsic value, that is predictable, sustainable and transferable value within a company. And when you do that, your cost of capital goes down, your cost of debt goes down. It puts you in a really good position to grow and scale and create a better working environment. Absolutely. I think that is so valuable. And I really appreciate you diving into that background and even a little bit into what it looks like, what these eight competencies are to run a business. I'm sure we have some listeners on right now who are thinking, wow, this is such a completely different topic from, it's a little bit left field for us as far as bringing this core competency of business acumen to our listeners. But to anyone, even if you're a young engineer who's listening in right now, there's such a value. And if you do have aspirations to move, to make any kind of development in your career, whether you want to go from EIT to PE, whether you want to be a product engineer or senior project manager or a partner within the firm that you work at or start your own business, it's so important to know how your business is run, how the company is run. Because while you may be younger in your career and you may, the majority of your day might be crunching calculations and modeling things and going through the execution piece, your boss and your boss's boss are looking at, are we being most productive in the way that we produce work? Are we bringing in a steady amount of clients? Are we keeping clients happy? Are we communicating? Are we transparent with our work? And all of these different things that your management is looking at towards your performance now and maybe your future development or future roles is always business centric because they are responsible for that business piece. And so these, all these pieces that Renz is sharing with us is so important to your future growth whether or not you wanna be a business person, quote unquote. It's important to know how things work, how the machine works and how you make it work best for you. So there's really some fantastic tidbits here that he's sharing with us and I hope you're connecting the dots and seeing the bigger picture outside of just the work that you did today. That's very well said. I'd like to add to that. So as someone, as an employee, as an engineer who's working in a company and you're sensing frustrations from things that you're running into on a day-to-day basis I would challenge you to really try to think and identify what is the root cause of that frustration because likely what's creating the frustration is a symptom. It's likely not the root cause. So if you're looking to advance your career and position yourself for career growth one way to do that is to really round your understanding of like organizational structure and how you deliver value to a client because if you're even within a company say you're not at a spot where you want to launch a new company but if you want to just advance your career and increase your value to the company being able to identify root causes and help come up with a solution is a tremendous opportunity to advance your career. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to guy said it so well but it is really that's what I tell the younger engineers of course you're an engineer focus on your technical stuff but then that's your foundation you have to be technical but as you go further and further in your career develop these other skills because that's what's really going to help you out and be a better problem solver like you said Renz if you can just go a step beyond just technical problem solving and you can go into like the business aspects the people aspects of problem solving and how to add value I think that's when your firm will realize that you know you're not just a commodity you're someone that you know that if you can't just hire a computer program or do your job you actually have value to your firm and to the clients too so great points. Well said Matt. That brings up another thought for me if you're as an engineer right we are all well educated in leading very respected careers engineering like other skills say a mechanic, a dentist, a doctor, a lawyer, an architect if all you do is work on that one specific skill unless you become like the top 0.1% of the ability in that skill you're gonna have a ceiling earning potential because that skill only produces so much value in the industry so if you're looking to increase your earning potential you need to be advancing in other competencies within your own control so very similar to the eight areas of business that I discussed you can apply that same kind of perspective to yourself if you're really exceptional at engineering but you're deficient in how you talk to colleagues or advance the engineering skill set of other like entry-level engineers in your company or manage clients if you're deficient in those other areas you're minimizing your overall earning potential so if you try to focus on and be aware of where your weaknesses might be and look to improve at those or at least building awareness in those areas you're able to leverage your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses Renz can you go into a little bit more about your leadership style and your leadership values and how someone that kind of wants to get into that leadership position how can they implement that and adopt kind of that style that's effective? Yeah absolutely so when I think of like the environment we were created or we've created in our continuing to advance that H&O going back to mission vision values like our mission is to create a better experience and we say that in the context again for our team and our clients so we're talking internal with our team we think people in our industry they're seeing these poor organizational structures that limit career growth they lack design processes so it's kind of a trial by fire right you learn how to design a building or a bridge by just working under somebody else and kind of picking up and asking questions so it takes a certain person to be really successful and advance quickly in that environment so what can an organization do to create a better working environment there so when we come back to our core values our core values are embrace growth be a partner and be responsive and so embrace growth is really it's about becoming a lifelong learner and be willing to constantly evaluate how we operate right so never can an answer be that's how we've always done it that's the best way right like you really got to vet your process and when you create an environment where everyone's trying to grow and it's a learning environment I'm gonna be a little sidetracked but we think a really toxic environment is one where people are afraid to make mistakes mistakes are really an opportunity for an entire organization to improve so if you have an environment where somebody makes a mistake and you really scroll that individual for making that mistake when if they haven't been trained in what competencies or skillset and there's not a design process to follow for that person to avoid that mistake is it really the individual's mistake or is it the organization's mistake right but not all leaders and I would say most leaders are unaware of the deficiencies in their organization that led to that employee mistake or a mistake on that project so when you can create an environment that's positive in a learning environment those are really lessons learned not necessarily mistakes here's the situation that we faced here was the results here's how we overcame that here's what I think we should do to improve our organization and our design process so if I were to take that back to me as a leader like those are really those are values that I really believe in like kind of coming back to my overall like business development and understanding of organizational value that's purely through lifelong learning not being afraid to fail and really being able to take a step back and look at like cause versus symptom right like what can you do today that's developing the new behaviors and competencies that lead to the growth that you want to achieve and so you take that individually and you put that into an organization and that's kind of that's really the culture we're looking at that's fantastic quick sidebar to any of our listeners who are still in college and maybe haven't gone for that first full-time employment yet when you're looking at different companies I mean Renz is telling you as a leader that his personal values make up those core values that are written on their wall or on their website so when you're doing research on different companies I would encourage you to really take a hard look at that mission and vision statement and see if it aligns with what you want out of your career and if those core values tend to align with your personal values it means you might be looking at a good fit from an employment standpoint so just something to think about I do want to focus on you started to talk a little bit about mistakes and one of the things that I know is kind of creates a vicious cycle is that when you're thinking about taking that next step fear and doubt are some of those big scary things that hold us back from doing the right things and unfortunately fear and doubt can stem from a mistake and mistakes can be a result of fear and doubt in your own personal capabilities so I'm curious these are two of the biggest hurdles anyone in their career specifically engineers who like to be right and do things correctly all the time can can really battle against when they're trying to develop themselves what are some of those limiting beliefs that you believe prevent one from advancing the career and how do you suggest how can you advise others to overcome those those barriers that's a great question so one I think the biggest fear of making mistakes stems from people think they as a person and their character is judged by their performance when I would argue that is absolutely not true you should never judge yourself and your character based on your performance and your job and a sport and anything your character is really like trust like are you humble like do you help others like are you are you giving when I come when I come back to like making the decisions and helping overcome fear I like to do an exercise that's it actually stems from Tim Ferriss he gave a TED talk I forget what year it is I would urge you to look it up but I think he calls it a fear analysis or I like to refer to it as the cost of inaction so if you have a fear of what might happen because you try something list down list the 10 worst case scenarios if you were to go for it now what things what 10 things can you do today that would help prevent those things from occurring and then if those worst case things actually do happen how do you solve them once they do happen what's the cost once you've gone through that exercise like even for someone that's like concerned with that fear you're going to have a pretty good sense of what you're going to run into now in a parallel exercise you want to do what's the cost of inaction if I don't develop this competency and try to push myself in my career I'm going to stay in the exact position I am today till the end of time and how is that going to impact my life what's the cost of inaction and what you'll find is the cost of inaction is often greater than the cost of action that same kind of thing not to go into personal financing or investing like that's that's the same kind of mentality when it comes to putting money in this like in the stock market like to generate real wealth you want to be and you want to be an owner of public companies real estate and private companies right so the stock market is is a way that we can all do that and investing in a company even though it can be volatile at times in the long haul over time 10 30 year period you see that money compounds over time even just an S&P 500 it returns 10% so your cost of capital is a compounding 10% growth but if you're afraid to of the volatility in the stock market you hold on to that money your money is not growing at 10% compounding per year it's actually losing money every year because the value of the dollar has has decreased over time so that kind of same mentality it's like you really want to again evaluate what's the cost of inaction and always understand the worst case in area and how do you overcome it and with the cost of action yeah that's great decision-making advice because I know it's it's always one of those things that it's I think it's definitely a great life skill because there's a lot of times especially for for younger engineers maybe they're asked to go speak in front of their office or something and go give a lunch and learn but I know that's a lot of that's pretty scary for for newer engineers but again kind of going back to that that exercise that you just did like what's the cost of not doing this well you're going to stay the same but if but if you do do it maybe you might get you'll help out your office you'll you'll stand out in your firm a little bit more and you'll get more comfortable speaking in front of other people the cost of not doing that you're just going to stay the same and it's not going to help your career in any way so I think that's a great exercise and kind of diving into that you do take action you know anything worth it isn't going to be easy there's going to be times when it's very difficult do you have any advice on on how to get through those difficult times I I believe you mentioned you know going into the the power of purpose or why could you dive into a little bit more about that to show how people can use that to get over difficult times yeah sure so I think for anyone defining like what they actually want in life is super important and that can be your why right like I want to say I heard this on a podcast they're talking about like if you had all the money in the world what would you do and it's like I would live on the beach in the Caribbean it's like well if that's true you don't need all the money in the world to actually go do that so what do you really want and like so when you go through that exercise of really defining your why it creates a lot of clarity and what your goals are this year in five years and what your day to day actions are actually moving towards and when you find your purpose it really helps you overcome the challenging times right like we all face adversity the ones that stick through the adversity are the ones that have meaning beyond like their efforts to overcome all of those hurdles to beat their goal if their goal at the end of the day again can be fear driven right it can be like they're attaining that goal because that's what's expected of them in an industry and that's what is is valued in and admired within an industry so they want to achieve it that person when the going gets tough isn't as likely to push through to get that goal because it was really kind of a vanity driven goal it wasn't actually what they wanted it was what their colleagues or peers valued or what they perceive their peers valued and why not ask to be true so I think going through the exercise to define like what do you actually want and that this should be well beyond your career it's like personal family friendships spiritual mental health physical you want to really have balance to your to your personal goals in life and you want to make sure you're revisiting those and assessing those every year because then it it reinforces your purpose and your why so that when the going does get tough you really have a meaning and a reason to push through I appreciate that and I actually I'm in I'm currently pursuing my MBA and I recently just took my organizational leadership ethics and change course and one of the things that we had to do was identify personal values and I know you keep going back to value the company and these this mission and vision but when you're looking at that power of purpose and you're really trying to focus on what is it that you want to be what's the legacy you want to leave behind what is the purpose for your energy what are you trying to contribute I think it's really interesting because I've been reading a lot of articles recently about how as it's important to that for a business so that you have direction and you have some kind of understanding and put things in context as to whether or not you're meeting your own personal objectives you should be doing that exercise creating a mission and a vision statement and values for your own person your own being and I think that your your suggestion that people be self-reflective and have an idea of what it is that they actually do want to spend their time on is kind of aligns with that I also see that there's a lot more of that direction happening for even young kids when you know instead of saying well what do you want to be when you grow up well you know we don't necessarily say I want to be a teacher or a fireman or whatever the noun is it's actually the question that they're trying to ask children when they think about a career is what is it you want to solve what are the problems you want to solve what are the things you want to fix how do you want to make life better for other people and when you ask about it from a purpose standpoint rather than a positional standpoint it changes the dynamic and their their collection of answers actually widens outside of just the traditional rules that they see in like a kids book so I think it's interesting and I wish I wish we had all kind of grown up with that mentality of purpose over position and I think it's something that is really beneficial regardless of how old you are 220 or 92 that's great yeah I think that's amazing the people that are interested in going through that I highly recommend Darren Hardy is the author it's called living your best year ever and it's basically it's kind of a workbook in a sense but it kind of walks you through the concept and the meaning behind the exercise and you reflect on the past year and then kind of indicate like what you want to change and how you want to grow over the next year it's like a goal setting exercise but I found a ton of value and I've done that every year for the last six years my my my best friend and I do the exact same exercise and then we actually select one single word it's typically a verb but one single word for our year that encapsulates what we want to achieve and we actually just this week had our like mid-year checkpoint of of how we're going with our goals and you know 2020 has been such a weird year that everything's gone sideways so it doesn't matter what word you picked it has come out in the wash completely different but you know it's it's really great yeah yeah it's so important it's it kind of feels like you know you got to treat yourself as a business to like what's your purpose what's your goal where are you going because yeah if you're not I think that's an easy way to get burnt out in your work if you don't know why you're doing that work in the first place so great points guys I think it's really great and just the power of asking these questions to yourself it's a great way to get yourself aligned and you know really see the purpose in your work whatever you're doing or you can see that you're not doing the work that you want to do and you want to go in another direction oh Renz you know you have all this development and career success did you have any mentors in your life or how important is mentorship to you and I guess if people are trying to look for some type of mentorship what's what's the best way to to do that in their careers yeah absolutely so I think it's extremely important to have people in your inner circle or mentors or advisors that you can reach out to to just to be certain decisions and occurrences that you run into in your life right you you want to have a good inner circle that you know is there because they care about you and they're going to lead with your best interest that you can openly share your feelings and motions and thoughts on any of these challenges that you run into so that you're getting some advice the other piece of that is I think a number of people have said this but you're basically a summation of the five people you spend the most time with right so you want to choose those five people very intently you want to be very aware of who you're spending time with so if you're looking to advance your career and get to the next step or or just develop new competencies and grow as a person it's really good to one find books around those topics because that's going to just really expose you to other people's ideas that have just documented them in books right like you read a new book on a topic you're just exposing yourself to somebody else's experience would you then can grow from much faster than that person that wrote the book so it's really like a it's such a big benefit to have all these things especially with technology and honorable and all these things today like how fast we can get those new experiences through books in the same way when you can find people in your life that are striving for similar goals or have achieved a certain level of success or development that you're interested in it helps to just reach out to those people and try to build a relationship because then they can become your advocates and people to lean on that help guide you through those challenging times or just times of yeah for sure it's I always like to tell people you know good go find a good group of professional organizations or what not to have you know they have the the right work ethic and kind of the values that you want to emulate because you're going to learn by osmosis and even with leadership the more you're around these types of people that you want to be like it'll rub off on you and you'll kind of pick up on the habits on on how to do that like I picked that up when we had like an open office on how to talk to clients I just listen in on you know some of our managers talking to clients and I was like oh that's that's how you talk to clients I didn't really ask but then you kind of learn it just by observing it's great yeah so I I'm really excited we've kind of stuffed this this whole conversation really nicely you start off by talking a lot about some some bigger topics around the the business level and we've kind of scaled it down to the individual and then the circle around the individual and how you can you know be have ownership over your own career and then work out with others and have mentors to learn and grow and I want to kind of come back full circle and bring it back to the overall work environment so I know you have a really strong belief that every person deserves to work in a positive work environment and have those opportunities for advancement and I think you've done a really great job of kind of talking to us about the advancement portion but I'd like for us to close on what it is to build a positive work environment I think that's such a fantastic concept and I think it's something that a lot of younger engineers are demand maybe more than other more tenured engineers but I think it is something that should be ubiquitous in any industry not just engineering can you tell us a little bit about your opinion on a positive work environment and how you guys enable that at H&O. Absolutely and hopefully this doesn't sound like a broken record but it kind of comes back to it's really building a circle of trust and that's when how we frame the positive work environment as we refer to it as really like a growth environment environment for learning and making sure people aren't afraid to make mistakes and ask questions because the second you create the second there's toxicity or friction or fear of being wrong like your organization is stagnant they're dead in the water there's not really any opportunity for advancement because the people within the company are contributing to that advancement anymore because they're afraid to speak up they're afraid to be wrong so when you can create an environment that's really about learning and growing and you frame mistakes as like just an opportunity in a new experience that helps that's something new that can help improve the organization that's creating a mindset a collaborative work environment a culture that's really focused on growth and strategy and improving and when the entire company it starts to think that way and you're going in the same direction not to go back to mission vision and value of a clear direction you have a clear purpose you have guiding principles that align decision-making and you have a learning environment like everyone is really rolling in the same direction and when you have that kind of momentum within an organization it's going to grow naturally because your clients are going to demand that it grows and your people are going to outgrow the current size of the organization which is really just going to which is going to force the organization to grow to give everyone more opportunities and that to us is really what it means to lead a fulfilling career when you can create an organization that delivers such a good experience to your clients and such a good work experience for your team that allows them to grow that it just naturally pushes the organization that that is so fulfilling to us and that's like what we're really excited about with the future age now. I love that I think that's fantastic and I think there's one word that that really is like the bedrock of so many of those those elements of a positive work environment and that that bedrock is trust because if you don't believe that your leadership trusts you to try new things or if you don't trust that if you make a mistake that there aren't going to be you know that people are going to be understanding and and help you embrace that mistakes that you learn from it then you you really don't have the room to thrive in an organization. So to my my my little tidbit for any of our listeners here is that if you find yourself just trusting of the freedom or the safety or the security of your team or your leaders direction that they give you maybe maybe do some self reflection and see you know where does that distrust lie and and that might help you understand you know where it is that you have room to grow and you have room to contribute directly to your organization your team by building a better atmosphere trust that allows us positive work environment to to really take hold and root and grow. Totally agree and for for people really looking to continue advancing their career an important piece of trust is that I always think trust should be given but then it's also like on the person that we're giving trust to it's really important that you your behavior and actions keep that trust right so say there's a mistake which is framed as a learning experience that's okay when that mistake happens once but you can't just write it off that this is a learning experience I made a mistake it won't happen again you need to make sure that you're holding yourself accountable and your team is holding each other accountable that not only was it a mistake but we really understand the root cause of the symptom which is the true mistake you got to understand the root cause and that you're going to actually grow to improve and prevent that mistake from happening again a learning environment and an environment of trust isn't like just the freedom to make any mistake in the world it's really about the culture and creating learning so when you can hold yourself accountable to that that's when that really flourishes and becomes a great place to work. Totally agree Rens thank you so much for joining us today. I think this was a really big eye opener for some of our audience who may be less familiar with some of these more overarching topics to to running an engineering business. I'm I'm excited to connect our listeners with you. I know that you're extremely active on LinkedIn that and I both are as well so we've got a good little team right here. Is that where our listeners should connect with you or are there other places where they can either follow what you're doing or or get connected. Yeah please connect with us on LinkedIn and then if you're interested in checking out H&O Structural Engineering our websites at hazoneal.com H-A-Y-E-S-O-N-E-I-L-L.com we're always looking to grow our relationships with other engineers so if you're at all interested in just hearing more about H&O or building a relationship please please reach out to us through our website or on LinkedIn we'd be happy to get to know you. Rens I had one last question for you. I know you read a lot of books do you have any book recommendations for young engineers that you know that do you want to do more of this lifelong learning and improving themselves. Absolutely so for anyone out there that's really interested in becoming a lifelong learner or just learning about the importance of being a lifelong learner and how it can impact your life. I'd recommend the compound effect by Darren Hardy that's one of the first books I read a little over at the first book I ever read but the first book that led me on building a habit of reading every day and that was about a little over six years ago and it's one of the best investments I've made personally. I've grown so much as a person just from listening to audiobooks during my commute every day and I've now come to recognize that time as the most important part of my day and for those that are looking to understand the nuances and inefficiencies in most organizations. The e-myth which is the entrepreneurial method by Michael Gerber is a great second book to read so that's the compound effect by Darren Hardy and then the e-myth by Michael Gerber walks through like the typical growth of a small business and the hurdles obstacles and challenges that they face and I know the first time that I read that book literally every single frustration and challenge and mistake that they made in that organization I saw in all of my work experiences and it's only my awareness and when you start to read these books really what those experiences do it helps build your awareness of what causes the symptoms that drive our emotions and frustrations on a day to day and it's a really empowering thing to become aware of what causes those frustrations because then it gives us as individuals the control that we need to see past those how to solve them how to navigate those to still lead a fulfilling life. Yeah I actually read the e-myth and yeah definitely a great book and you know it's definitely helped me out in my career too like you know I'm an employee so you know not entrepreneur but knowing what they go through how stages of a business it lets you add more value to your company seeing what their processes are the weaknesses are like you were saying and you know like for me I saw like one of the things was maybe our on-boarding process that could use some help I can help out on that you know on my free time things to help the company out so it's a great way to see a bigger picture and how you can help out your company and more than just you know a numbers way so definitely a great book and to build more awareness. Yeah it's well said Matt and you mentioned earlier that we're all kind of like our own individual companies right and that we're working for the organization but we're really like if you think of yourself as your own company the organization is really your sole client so when you're reading and in building your own competencies and awareness to those things it's only providing you opportunity and a new perspective on how to deliver value to your client. We hope you enjoyed the episode today we would love to hear your feedback comments and or questions to leave them please visit structural engineering channel dot com there you'll find a summary with the key points discussed in today's episode which is episode number 33 as well as any links to any of the resources websites and books mentioned during the episode don't forget to subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you tune in to your podcasts until next time wish you the best and all of your structural engineering