 Welcome to the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast. A podcast focused on helping geotechnical engineers stay up to date with technical trends in the field. I'm your host Jared Green and I've practiced as a geotechnical engineer for over 17 and a half years and in addition to practicing engineering, I enjoy mentoring young engineers and first-generation college students. I've focused on helping to increase the number of pre-college students that are interested in steam, majors and fields, that being science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. In this episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, I'll be talking to Seth Perlman, PE, DGE, who's the president and CEO of Menard Group USA. Seth will be talking to us about what his company does, a little bit about ground improvement and how to advance in your career. He has over 40 years of engineering experience with the last 34 being in the Geotechnical design and building construction industry. He earned his BS and an MS in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and is a registered professional engineer in Pennsylvania and Virginia. He's a member of the Geo Institute, American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE, American Concrete Institute, ACI, American Society of Highway Engineers, Design, Build, Institute of America, Engineers Society of Western Pennsylvania, The Moles, and the past president of the Deep Foundations Institute, DFI. He serves on an advisory council to the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Mr. Perlman received many awards and worked on some of the most challenging ground improvement projects in the United States. He will include his full bio in the episode show notes. And with that, let's jump right into our conversation with Seth. All right, Seth, welcome to the Geotechnical Engineering podcast. We're honored to have you. How are you feeling, man? I'm feeling fine, Jared. How are you today? Doing well. Doing well. Can't complain. Can't complain. Yeah. I'm hanging in there. This has been at home for six months, but we're doing all right. I know. It's just, it's killer. It's like, you want to get out and when you go out, it's like, oh, don't forget my mask and all the other things, right? Yeah. We walk, we ride bikes, we play little golf. It's not so bad. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Seth, in your own words, can you tell us a little bit more about, let's say, what the daily basis looks like for you and Menard? So my job carries a few roles. I'm day to day, at least half of my time running Menard US, which is spread out around the eastern half of the country to about all the offices. And I have oversight and board level responsibility for Menard, Canada, and Cone Tech, which is based in Canada, but also operating in the US. And we have some developing international platform for Cone Tech. I have some board responsibility with Menard in France. Okay. Excellent. So that's kind of my, it spreads across, but it's clearly it's Menard. Excellent. Excellent. And we say Menard group US, who is Menard group USA? So we are specialty design, build geotechnical contractors, doing ground improvement. We have offices, if you did, if you drew yourself a backward C starting in Minneapolis, coming across Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Jersey, upstate New York, down the East Coast, and across to Houston. That's kind of where all of our local offices are based. We don't have too much to the interior of the country, but don't hold your breath too long because we'll be there soon. And it became Menard group USA because a little while back we acquired a company historically called US Wick Drain. It was in North Carolina and it changed the name to USW. At the end of the day, we operated as one group as Menard. We keep the historical USW on the books for some other reasons to have two operating companies. Excellent. Excellent. And then, you know, Menard, what's the history of Menard? Like, what's the significance of that name? So, so Menard was started by an inventor, a guy named Louis Menard. He went to one of the top engineering schools in France and came to the US in the 50s to get a masters. In 1954, he recorded an invention for what we know today as the Menard Pressure Meter. It's a one meter long tool that goes in a borehole and you expand it out and you get a mid-place modulus in the soils. That was his invention. In 57, he started a company to manufacture and distribute the tool around the world. He went around the world then trying to sell it and develop his company. And in 68, he listed an invention for what he called dynamic compaction and his thinking was that he would use this tool to prove out the work. In 69, he did his first really large dynamic compaction project. And in the early days of dynamic compaction, Menard went to places where huge fills were being put in like large marine dredge fills. They would make new airports, things like that. And they built massive machines, custom made massive machines that would drop weights 50 tons, 70 tons. These massive weights on these big tripods and big customized cranes with 50 wheels on them and huge counterweights and things like that. So they did some really crazy stuff in the beginning. It was all non-standard, but it all demonstrated and made a science out of banging on the ground. That's kind of how the company started. And then it evolved over time to where, and now today, and it's interesting because we were doing the pounding, we were doing stone columns, developing as a normal ground improvement contractor would. But in 1994, a professor in France that was working with us as was an owner of Menard patented these CMCs, control modulus columns. And today, that's our major product in the US. It's over three-fourths of the business. Around the world, it's over half the business. We've been doing them. We patented them in the US in the early 2000s and we're doing them now around the world for about 26 years. And that is a lead product as part of a suite of techniques that we use all under this definition that we call ground improvement. Okay. Well, I mean, what is ground improvement? So I have kind of an elevator answer for that. Or what you could say, the guy sitting next to you in the plane answered for that. So the guy said, well, you do, you know, I run this company called Menard. We do ground improvement. What's ground improvement? Okay. So this is the layman's answer. I'll start with that. I'll say, well, you know, if you go to build something, you have really good ground, you scrape the ground, you put some footings and you build the building, right? People understand that they've built houses or whatever they've built. Yep. And then you say, you know, if you have really crappy ground, I'm sure you've seen people driving piles, you know, creating deep foundations so you can stand up a very big building on soft, on poor ground. Yep. Well, there's a very large range of opportunity between good ground and ground where you need piles. And we fill that range. And there's also an increasing risk. So if the ground's super good, no problem. As the ground gets more marginal, until we had ground improvement, engineers would say, I remember in the early days reading reports where the engineer might say, you can use three-quarter tons per square foot or one ton per square foot, give them some really low bearing pressure. Yeah. Based upon maybe some old fill that have been there for 30 years or something that probably was okay for a lightweight building, but nobody wanted to take a chance otherwise, right? And now with risk management and other things, on the low end of those kinds of jobs, most engineers won't even certify an old fill without doing something to it. And on the high end, when you make the jump to piling, as the risk increases, as the ground gets worse, and you say, okay, I need to put in piling, that's a huge cost increase for the client to mitigate that risk. Yeah. There are many, many cases until you reach that maximum case where you have to use the piling, where you can substitute some kind of ground improvement technique. So what is it? So we fill this big risk slash cost void with several basic principles. You either densify it, you consolidate it, in the case of clays or things that'll squeeze water out of it, or you reinforce it. So we densify it by banging on it as we talked about, or vibrating it with multiple techniques in that genre, depending on the depth and the amount of energy you need. You can drain it with wick drains, or vacuum consolidation, or just a straight surcharge and allow it to settle out if it has the ability to drain. Or you can reinforce it with stone columns, stone piers, grout columns, CMCs, piles, that you can design a pile using ground improvement philosophies. But when you reinforce it, it means just that you're creating a composite. You're not ignoring the contribution of the soil. You're using the contribution of the soil and doing more of a soil structure interaction design, as opposed to piles, which are just saying, okay, the soil is going to keep my pile from buckling, but I'm going to put 100% of load on these piles. So that's the big difference, and that's where the line gets drawn between the two. Gotcha, gotcha. So you got this range of doing nothing all the way up to doing piles. So there's like a big range there, and this ground improvement lives in there. What are the degrees within that range of ground improvement? Well, you can spend a couple of dollars a square foot. You can spend 40. It depends on depth. It depends on the difficulty of the technique. I also failed to mention mixing. You can do soil mixing and create composite cement and soil columns. You can create walls of things. You can do, you can use it also for seismic mitigation. There's a new technique that we've been doing more recently. We call them earthquake drains. They're larger, four-inch diameter slotted pipes wrapped with a fabric sock that are put in the ground through a mandrel. And the theory is that if you put enough of these in, you have sort of a rapid drainage reservoir in an earthquake case to prevent full liquefaction. You allow sort of a partial liquefaction, rapid drainage, and you still maintain sheer strength. So you don't have a flowing failure. You don't have a full liquefaction case. And we're using them in some markets. There's some debate about acceptance. Again, with all these techniques, because they're newer, it requires education, requires study, it requires acceptance. And acceptance of any new technology doesn't occur all at once. It occurs, you sort of, it's like a religion, you know, you convert a few people at a time. It's a good way to put it. So, I mean, some of the techniques you're talking about, I mean, honestly, you know, we're talking about ground improvement. It resembles piling in a sense. Is there a difference in a piling ground improvement? Yeah, there is. Well, first of all, piling is codified, right? Now, that doesn't mean to say that you can't continue to develop new techniques for piling, new types of piling, new thinking about how you design it. But it has kind of a mentality that goes with it, because it's structurally connected to the building. So when you think philosophically about a facility on piling, the total structure is the total holistic thing all the way to the bottom of the piling. Just because part of the structure is buried in the ground, that doesn't mean it's not part of the structure. So it's all one deal, right? Yep. With ground improvement, there's a decoupling philosophically, right? You either have a mat, you have spread footings, even a slab on grade for a big spread warehouse or storage facility of some sort, bulk storage facility. And you make the ground behave like one of those mattresses. You get your pillow top, and then all your little springs, and the whole thing works well together. But the structure can still move around. You can still turn over, you can still get up, and the structure and the ground does what it does, and it responds to the structure. So you can be more creative with the concrete work. In fact, much of the savings is not necessarily in how much effort you put in the ground, but what you can do to economize on the concrete foundations, because with piling you have to be able to draw that load into these large pile caps, grade beams, some kind of structural system underneath. Whereas when you're thinking about ground improvement, you typically want to spread it out more. So just the whole system of thinking changes, and the economy has to be holistic, both when you're looking at piling schemes and ground improvement schemes. Now going back to the question, are there differences or is it the same? Much of the equipment we use to make CMCs, our primary offering, which is we think that one of the highest value offerings that we have, is piling equipment. It's piling equipment set up the way you typically set up to do very high production auger cast or auger displacement piles. So we typically use a displacement tool on the end of a very high torque drillhead with a big pull down winch on it, and we're squeezing or displacing a hole in the ground and pumping a cementitious grouter concrete as we come up, either a sanded mixer or a small area mix. So and we sometimes even reinforce them. It's got a loading involved due to movement, due to being next to the top of the slope or underneath a highway wall that has this underlying stability issue and some lateral restraint problems as a passive tie down underneath the shear wall. So they can be reinforced as well. That doesn't make them necessarily by definition piles if you're designing using this more holistic approach. So but I'm sure the piling guys might argue otherwise. That's the right to, that's okay. Got it, got it. I think the decoupling is a, I think that's a good analogy in the mattress, you know, to kind of explain the difference. Okay. So we're in an interesting time. Interesting time can mean a lot of things, but I'm talking about as we look at say government budgets, right? And government budgets are for the most part dwindling as it comes towards things such as critical infrastructure. What implications do you think there are for ground improvement? Well, you know, we talked about acceptance and how you get people, you know, you get them one customer at a time, one believer at a time, right? And there are some DOTs that have been very open towards these techniques. And we've been able to bring some really large-scale projects in for very economical costs. Meaning, I don't know, have you ever been in New Orleans? You know, I have not, but I have a lot of friends. Okay, so a classic example is when you drive through the swamps of New Orleans and they have deep, soft clays and you see all these ramps when you're getting close to the airport, these ramps coming off the highway. And some of these elevated bridges are only eight or 10 feet off the ground. And it's a lot of structures, a lot of expense, a lot of maintenance. And there are huge values in building calm, supportive embankments, which we do typically with CMC. And we of course support high embankments as well on CMC. So with highways, you can build very well-performing embankments that settle in small reasonable amounts and without putting them up on high structures. Whereas classically, you would run those structures until the abutment got maybe six or eight feet off the ground. Yeah, soft settling ground. And the other thing is, and I'll be for fear of being criticized by DOTs, DOTs are way too caught up in codes and standards and plateaus. And I firmly believe that if design build and trusted relationships are developed between responsible design builders and owners and consultants in a team without being prescriptive, you can create huge savings. So you can build more with the same amount of money. And I think instead, we tend to set bars, we tend to spend money on things that are not always the best value. And so it either kills projects, waste money, or makes the project more expensive than it needs to be just because someone has a little bit of fear. For example, if we've looked at column squirt embankments where 80% of the settlement is coming from the top 50 feet, and then there's a very dense sand layer and another lens of clay that might produce another half an inch of long-term settlement at death below the sand layer. And the cost to get below that sand layer into that last lens of clay doubles the price of the support job and it's unnecessary. So what's the price for that extra long-term half an inch of settlement on your roadway approaching the bridge? It's not worth it because you can design the transition to accommodate that very easily. And that's where that requires then people who are willing to take the leap to say, you know, I don't need my highway to have zero settlement. And I want to bring value to my customer, the DOT and the traveling public to pay for these highways. Got it. But in order to do that, you have to look at holistically. You can't just say this is the foundation bid package. This is the superstar bid package. I got you. You can't just write what has to be one inch no matter what. Design to that regardless of the cost. You know, somebody proposes you like and do it with an inch and a half and it saves you a few million dollars. You ought to talk about that, right? Yeah, that makes sense. And sometimes they do and it's very, it's district by district, state by state, engineer by engineer. As I say, you have to take them one believer at a time. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, we had a recent guest who you know very well, but he criticized ground improvement looking at it and he's a piling contractor. And he said that, you know, from a ground improvement standpoint, you don't have to follow the same rules as a piling guy. What is your response to that? What do you take to that? Sure. It's not the first time you heard somebody say that. No, no. And you know, it goes to what I just said about do you need to spend the money. I remember, you know, I worked years ago at Nicholson for a long time. I read a lot of piling specs and they would talk about 50 blows for the last inch or, you know, you're smashing the heck out of this thing. You know, so what's really, what does refusal mean? And so these pile specs, and I'm sure they've been modernized since things, they've gone to energy methods and other things. But the fact is, if people aren't willing to create continuous improvement, then the pile specs aren't going to bring value to their clients. And as I say, there are places where piling should be used. On the other hand, with ground improvement, we're constantly trying to bring the best value. The competition sits with best value. It's not who can do the prescriptive technique for the least cost per linear foot. It's who can produce the design that gives you the service that they want and serviceability that they want for the best price and time and value, quality, time, safety, everything. So it's, and we are continuing to improve the quality of our stuff. I can't speak for some of the other competitors. We have some very high-end competitors, but there may also be other people that could be leading that competitor to say, geez, ground improvement is sloppy here. It's not going to make up the rules, whatever they want. I'm sure there might be some people taking too much risk. And as with any new technology or developing technology, you may have some failures. We screwed up a few times. We've done thousands of jobs and not every one is absolutely perfect and we've repaired some jobs. But if you're going, but in terms of the overall collective value, if you don't take a little bit of risk, you're never going to be able to bring that value. And we've instrumented all kinds of sections. We've done all kinds of large-scale test programs. There's a lot of technology development behind this thing. And we feel very confident about the designs we make. And we're setting reasonable factors of safety and allowable stresses and other things in these designs that would make sense. And ultimately, our chief engineers, hopefully, will sit on some kind of code committee and help to write a code as this thing becomes more commoditized. It's just not ready to be commoditized yet. Gotcha. What do you think of, what do you think is the timeframe or something like that? Is that years away, decades away? Maybe another 10 years. I don't know. I'm not sure, but when you think about building codes, they set a minimum for people because you have to sort of regulate your industry. And I think we should look at the way we write all of our building codes because most of them have paragraphs that say something like, yes, this is what the code says, but if you can demonstrate with good engineering that it still works, you submit that to the building official and they'll consider your request. So I think that principle needs to be promoted more and taught more to the engineering kids. At any time I've ever spoken to a group of young engineers, I explained to them that codes are written by engineers that are just like what's sitting in this room. They're people who have done a little bit of master's research, PhD research, or done research in their companies. They've developed the technique. They go sit on a committee, they debate for 10 years, by the time the code passes, they're talking about 10-year-old technology and so it's just a snapshot. And if they're not working on continuing to develop that technology further and tweak it out a little bit, then it's not worth the trouble. The ACI 318 gets updated all the time, but when they're making those updates, they're representing research from 10 or 15 years prior, until it finally makes the code. And again, that's just setting a snapshot reflective of all the current research and all the people that are willing to take their efforts and put it into that document to make it a better living, breathing document. And I don't know for sure about the steel industry, hopefully they do the same thing, but I've been involved in ACI code writing with never steel. We need to understand that it's not just, it didn't come from on high on Mount Sinai and it handed over a set of tablets. Engineers wrote those for a reason and they wrote it based on their experience at that time. So doing ground improvement now is creating another set of experiences that ultimately will get written into a code and hopefully will continue to live and breathe as they get practiced. Sounds good. Sounds good. Fair point. So when we think about specialty geotechnical construction, there's so many different types, right? But let's say IRF retention. IRF retention, for the most part, aligns well with a design build approach. What about ground improvement? What's the best way for, how does this get acquired? How does it become a part of a project? Is it design build or something? Yeah, I mean, the sooner, so we like to work as part of the team with the architect, the structure engineer, the geo engineer, the owner, the contractor. The earlier we get in, typically the more value we can bring, right? So they have a concept for a building. They know what the footprint looks like. They know how it's going to be used. They know whether it's going to have shear walls or not. They know roughly how many floors. So they know what a way is per floor. They know where they want to put columns. So they've got some concept of where all the columns are going to go, where all the load bearing walls are going to go. And we don't need footings. We don't need anything else, except maybe what's happening in the shear walls. And we can budget that building and talk to them about what the footings might look like with our scheme. So in design build, we're bridging between the ground and the initial conceptualization of the concrete scheme and helping them minimize. I remember once doing a little building in Pittsburgh, the guy calls me up. He says, you know, I've got this thing designed on drilled shafts. It's putting the building over budget. Take a look. I gave him a price. I had no idea what the drilled shafts were worth. It turns out our scheme was half the cost of the drilled shafts. And it got all like the grade beams and heavy concrete out of it. And he came to me later and said, you know, had I known you could do this before, I would have saved us all kinds of detailing on the structural side, because I would have just detailed simple spread footings instead of all these grade beams. So it not only saved money on putting the foundations in and made his concrete a lot cheaper too, but he didn't get us in early enough. He still hired us. But he had to redraw the job. So he had designed the foundations twice. Who knows if the owner wanted to pay him for all that extra structural work. So it's all about just being respected as part of the team. And we have a design department of at least 12 full-time engineers just cranking numbers all day designing these jobs. So that's part of our process. We make a preliminary design before we give somebody a price. And we make a final design if we get part of the team. Makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. Well, I've been running around to a lot of, it's virtual, but I've been running around to a lot of career fairs the past few weeks. For a new engineer leaving college, what opportunities are at a company like Manara? Like ours? Yeah, or even a more experienced engineer is looking for a pivot. Yeah, so as I said, we have a lot of these regional offices and we're working to get more and more local. So each person that's running each major region is always looking to say, where's my next level office going to be? So we put small to medium teams in every one of these little regional branches. And it's a very entrepreneurial environment. We have kind of three really simple philosophies within Menard. It's make it as simple as you can. Be curious, which is all about, how's this building work? Where's the load really coming from? Why do you want what you want on this thing? Be entrepreneurial. So being entrepreneurial means that we push decisions down to the lowest level where they can be made. We like to say, if you know what you know, then take the decision. If you know what you don't know, ask questions. If you don't know what you don't know, then we're going to be in big trouble. So for young engineers that come through our system, they can move up very fast because we keep a really flat management structure. And rather than creating a big pyramid where there's a limit to how you can grow, we continue to just spread. So as soon as someone's ready, it might even be as little as three to five years experience. And then they say, oh, I want to go live in Kansas City. So okay, then go start an office in Kansas City. If we think they're ready, they can go do it. So there's, and we've started all of our branch offices, not by telling someone where to move, but by them coming to us saying, it's usually like, hey, my girlfriend's parents live in this town. I need to go there. Truly organic. And then they go start an office there. People are happy because they get the move where they want to move, not where they have to go. And, and it's a real, somebody else said to me recently, really crazy. He said, you know, the culture that we've created with challenging people asking questions, really getting them to learn fast and understand why we do things and understand why the client wants to do things. He called it infectious. You know, we spread this culture to be really excited about the things we do and to be really want to, and to really want to service the clients with the best value system. So, and where we're not the best fit for young engineers. And so if you're looking just to do code, follow code, follow a prescription, you know, put in something standardized, you probably shouldn't work for us. You know, you have to be willing to constantly be learning, challenging yourself a little bit. Got it. Got it. Well, excellent. Thank you, Seth. This is a good point to pause. We're going to pause for a moment and then we'll be right back to close out this talk with our career factor of safety in segment. Stick around. All right, welcome back. It's time for our career factor of safety in segment. When we think about geotechnical engineering, like many disciplines of engineering, it's important to incorporate a factor of safety into your design. But what about incorporating a factor of safety into your actual career? Today, we're speaking with Seth Perlman, PE, DGE. Seth, I'd like to pick your brain a little bit, say for a minute on productivity. You're a leader of a large organization and honestly, you sit in a seat where many engineers would aspire to. How do you decide on what to work on each day? And when you have so much at your responsible for overseeing, how do you give yourself a factor of safety against burnout? How do you stay productive? Well, for me, what drives me is knowing that I'm helping the people that work for us be successful. So my job is to be the servant leader. My job is to be at their behest, to be available to them, to advise and encourage and help them sort of tweak their thinking, help them be creative, help them learn to be creative, help them learn to challenge what they've come up with. As one of the guys says, well, so if we get Seth on the phone, we're on the risk of flipping the table. So for me, that keeps me going. If it's just, okay, I'm reviewing the standard thing, I'm checking my list, that would be no fun. We make it fun by always challenging. And just because we did it that way last year, doesn't mean we need to do it that way this year. We're always looking to say, how do we tweak our own productivity? How do we make every year a little bit better at what we're doing? In fact, it's paid off because I don't do a lot of real work anymore. My real work is just helping others. But the people that are doing the work have become much more productive through this continual process of challenging ourselves. So it helps us stay competitive. And people I think have more fun. It's boring when you're going slow, people love to go fast. That is great. That is great. Well, Seth, thank you so much for coming on and thank you for sharing all the great insights with us and thank you for your service to the industry community. You've shared some great information and advice that I know is going to help our listeners a lot. If our listeners wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way to find you? Social media, email? I'm on LinkedIn. They can get my email, ManardUSAS, P-E-A-R-L-M-A-N at ManardUSA.com or Manard Group USA. No problem. Call the office. Ask for Lorraine. She'll track me down. Without Lorraine, I couldn't function. That's the other way I stay productive is if somebody likes Lorraine. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Okay. Thanks a lot. Take care. I hope you enjoyed the show today. We would love to hear your feedback, comments, and or questions. Please feel free to go to GeotechnicalEngineeringPodcast.com, where you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode, that being episode eight, as well as links to any of the resources, websites, or books mentioned during this episode. Until next time, we wish you the very best in all your Geotechnical Engineering endeavors. Peace.