Engineering Management Institute

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Business/Entrepreneurship

Things You Need to Worry About When Running Your Own Engineering Business

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Things You Need to Worry About When Running Your Own Engineering Business is a guest blog by Scott Matthews

Engineering Business

Starting and running your own engineering business is always challenging. As many consultancies are small businesses, they face the same problems as similar ventures. 54% of SMB leaders have stated that acquiring talent is a problem.

In the world of engineering businesses, this is just the first step in a myriad of things you need to worry about. To help your business grow, we’ve analyzed the biggest concerns.

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How to Think Like an Entrepreneur with this One Simple Step

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How to Think Like an Entrepreneur is a guest blog post by Daniel Hayes, PE, PMP

Think Like an Entrepreneur When I started my engineering career, I worked hard to understand and apply engineering principles and processes required to prepare deliverables in a technically correct and efficient manner.

I consider myself a good engineer.  There was a time I believed the work should speak for itself.  Being an introvert by nature, I don’t like to sell and don’t want to come off as salesy.  I spoke of what I could do for the client.  Yet, clients and prospects always wanted something more.

Why does this happen?  Because as engineers, we are not selling construction plans.  We are not selling the latest in engineering technology.  We are not selling deliverables.  Instead, we are selling solutions to problems.  Real world problems that our clients need to be solved.

If a real estate developer retains a civil engineering firm to prepare a set of construction documents or to acquire the necessary permits and approvals for development, what the client wants is neither the construction documents nor the permit.  What he wants is a completed development, ready for resale or rent.  Engineering is just one of many means to this end and that is why you should start to think like an entrepreneur.

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Achieving Business Success as an Early Stage Entrepreneur

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Achieving Business Success as an Early Stage Entrepreneur is a blog post by Carol Evenson

Achieving Business SuccessFollowing the unprecedented increase in the number of people turning to entrepreneurship, there’s no denying that owning a business is unusually appealing. It’s easy to understand what creates this feeling. Everyone wants some measure of freedom to be able to make their own independent decisions and run their own show, however, do you know a large number of small businesses close every day? To avoid failure, you must mitigate the potential for failure. Below you’ll find five tips that can help you to start your own business and achieve business success.

Achieving Business Success

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5 Recommendations for How to Become a Successful Engineering Manager for Young Engineers with No Managerial Experience

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Through providing career-coaching services to engineers, I know that the most common problem that developing engineers are trying to solve is how to become a successful engineering manager.  After spending the early part of their engineering career becoming confident in their technical skills, many engineers are ready to take the steps required to become an engineering manager.  The problem is that there are no specific steps to become a successful engineering manager; the path is different for everyone.

If you could develop a drink, that when an engineer drank it, they would instantly become a successful engineering manager, I am convinced that it would make you a millionaire.

Want to Be a Successful Engineering Manager but Don’t Know Where to Start?

Download our Free Top Ten Recommendations (and Resources) on How to Become a Successful Engineering Manager

Since I haven’t developed that drink (yet), instead I would like to offer five recommendations from my hundreds of hours coaching both successful and unsuccessful engineering managers.  I am pretty sure this will be a multiple part post as I have more than 5 recommendations, but these are the first 5 that come to mind.
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Engineering Econ 201 – Understanding Business

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Engineers by-and-large have a bad rap when it comes to understanding business.  That is, the art of using engineering skills to create value for others, and themselves.  If you’re like I am, your first introduction to “business management” was the engineering economics course you took during your undergraduate program.  In retrospect, that course did nothing to prepare me for (a) managing resources or (b) understanding business finances.   In fact, twenty-plus years later, I can’t really recall what I learned in that course (perhaps cost estimating?)  To overcome what I viewed as a gap in my understanding of the world of business, I gained an MBA.  This was useful for the mechanics and terminology of business, however, it prepared me to be a good mid-level manager.  It didn’t prepare me to be an entrepreneurial business owner, the next step in my evolution.

So, what’s the answer?  How does one prepare themselves to be an entrepreneurial-engineer business owner?  Both good questions and both questions which I’m answering as I go forward.  This said, here’s the what I’ve discovered: [Read more…] about Engineering Econ 201 – Understanding Business