Engineering Management Institute

Networking/Client Relations

The Importance and Benefits of Getting Involved in Your Community

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This is a guest blog by Jon Savage

Getting Involved

Volunteer work and philanthropic efforts have been an integral part of Pennoni’s core values since 1966. And even prior to joining the firm in 2005, I’ve always valued the importance of them in both business and personal life.

“Getting Involved” With Your Community

“Getting involved” with your community is straightforward, and fun in many ways, but also involves your day-to-day routines, church, children, and other activities. My interests include improving local conditions and applying my expertise to my volunteer efforts. Most importantly, I’ve always had a sense of giving back to individuals and organizations that have helped me. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that’s really the best message I can relay to folks who do want to get involved in their communities.

getting involved

At the beginning of my career, after receiving my degree from Penn State and attempting to apply the expertise I had learned gaining a geography degree, I thought it might be useful to apply my planning skills to my local community where I grew up. As it turned out, there was a need on the local planning board for someone of my capabilities, even though I had just graduated with limited planning experience. While my tenure on the local planning board was about a year in length, I did learn many insights into local politics, and was able to contribute to objectives that the board was attempting to carry out and other areas of concern.

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Building Your Personal Brand as a Problem Solver: The Right Message at the Right Time

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This is a guest blog by Carl Friesen

problem solverBeing recognized as a problem solver in your organization, profession, or industry can bring big rewards. These include distinguishing yourself from people who just focus on performing a task. As a result, you can earn more respect from the people you work with. You have more control over the work you do, who you do it for, and how much you’re paid.

But to gain that reputation as a problem solver, you’ll need to gain buy-in for your proposed solutions from the people you work with. To do that, you need to communicate your ideas in terms understandable to those you need to convince. This applies whether you’re trying to “sell” your idea to one person — your supervisor — or convince thousands by writing an article for a national publication.

problem solver

Just like living beings, ideas have a lifespan, and to get buy-in you need to work with that fact.

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Personal Brand: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

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This is a guest post by Gabe Lett, FSMPS, CPSM, LPC

A personal brand is the perception a person has of you. Rather than the overall perception of a company, a personal brand is specific to you as an employee of your company. The reason for the elevation of personal branding has to do with the digital capabilities of social media and the ease of building a personal business network that spans geographies. The better you establish your personal brand, the more opportunities you bring to your company.

What Ingredients Make a Personal Brand?

A brand is simply the total experience people have when interacting with a company. What people feel and experience when they interact with a product or service makes its brand. Therefore, a personal brand is made from:

  1. Interaction with you personally
  2. Experience of you personally
  3. The emotion elicited when interacting with you and experiencing you personally

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5 Steps to Building and Maintaining Client Relationships

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This is a guest post by Zane Pucylowski , P.E.

Client Relationships

Customers want to work with engineers who provide excellent service by respecting their time and needs. However, manufacturing challenges, constant innovations, and changes to the industry can be a barrier to excellent customer service. Without great customer service and relationship building, new innovations and investments may never happen. Keeping a steady pipeline of existing clients will be beneficial to your firm. Existing clients keep your project board full and can recommend your firm to new clientele. However, closing on a new lead can take time, so it helps your firm to re-engage with existing clients. As the President and Principal Engineer at Phoenix Engineering and Consulting, I have seen the importance of maintaining solid client relationships. Here are five ways we work with clients to make sure we keep these relationships strong. 

1. Maintain an Open Mind 

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Three Situations Where Customers Are Not Always Right

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

CustomersYou must have heard this phrase before: “The customer is always right.” And chances are you have assumed that it applies to everyone and every business. However, based on my experience, there are three situations where this is not the case. In this article, I would like to share those situations with you so you won’t be negatively affected by misplaced beliefs or false expectations.

The idea or purpose behind this saying is to improve the quality of service we offer to everyone, whether they are purchasing products or services from us (external customers) or working on the same team as us (internal customers). However, over the last few years, I’ve seen many cases where internal and external customers have quoted this phrase to bend the truth a bit or break a rule. Here are three situations where the idea of,  “the customer is always right,” is wrong.

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Engineers Can Provide Stellar Client Service

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This is a guest blog by Tiffani Teachey

Provide Stellar Client ServiceStellar client service is the key to retaining clients. As an engineer, one might not think client service would be in an engineer’s wheelhouse, but it’s often one of the most effective ways to retain clients. Stellar client service is the key to your business and company’s success. It is a way to provide a competitive edge in the industry and help grow one’s company. The benefits of stellar client service outweigh the costs, as they will gain loyal customers who will come back for more! Below are three ways engineers can use their skill set and knowledge base to provide stellar client service:

Solving the Client’s Problems and Providing Solutions

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Providing Stellar Service to Your Engineering Customers

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This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

Providing Stellar Service to Your Engineering CustomersThink back to the last time you had a marvelous buying experience. It doesn’t matter what you were buying — a car, prescription drugs, or a hot dog. What made that experience stand out for you, the customer?

Now, put yourself in the shoes of your customers. They are the clients who hire you or your firm to provide whatever services you or your firm offer. How would they rate their experience as your customer?

A few years ago, I asked that question to a group of engineering project managers (PMs). Here are a few of dozens of topics they raised related to providing excellent service to their engineering customers:

Questions for Your Clients

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3 Ideas to Help Grow Your Community and Improve Your Life

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Grow Your CommunityIt goes without saying that we are living through unprecedented times. But we’re all tied up together in this thing called life. Think of each other as bees of the same hive. When one bee is hurt, the entire hive suffers. It goes the other way too; when one bee thrives, the whole hive prospers. So I’m here to discuss how growing as a single person will help grow your community and improve their quality of life.

It’s not difficult to wake up nowadays and feel like life is awful on all fronts: our jobs are stagnant, our government is letting us down, and our physical and mental health has been neglected. All of this makes us feel like we are not fulfilling our true potential, and we are unhappy as a result. Sure, we are not going at it alone, and this happens to everyone. But, how can we change it?

We can change it by bettering ourselves. Yes, we can help our communities grow and prosper by improving our own lives. It will take lots of work, but fortune favors the courageous. If we believe in ourselves, we will reach our personal life goals and become the best version of ourselves, therefore positively and holistically affecting our communities and the people in them.

1. Compete With Yourself and Root for Everybody Else

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Mastering the 4 Ways to Show Thought Leadership on LinkedIn

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This is a guest blog by Carl Friesen

LinkedInImagine your ideal client, employer, or business partner has heard about you and wants to learn more. Let’s give this person a name — we’ll call her “Aisha.” She’s someone you want to impress, as she could be the key to your brighter future.

So if she’s interested in learning more about you, how will she do it? Aisha will likely begin by going online, and what will likely show up first about you is your LinkedIn profile.

So ask yourself: Would Aisha be impressed with what she finds there? Will she be reassured that you’re a recognized expert in your field, someone worth her time?

One of the most important ways to show your expertise, so Aisha will take the next step of reaching out to you, is through publishing thought leadership content on your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn

It could be content about a new development in your field, such as a new law, regulation, or disruptive technology. Maybe it’s a trend you’ve seen. Or it could be a case study of a project you’ve worked on.

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Providing Stellar Client Service: Engage Holistically

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This is a guest blog by Mike Burns, PE, PgMP, DBIA

customer service

As we commence a discussion about client service, I find myself reflecting on my first Engineering Management Institute (EMI) blog, “Think Big, Be Mindful.” Serving our clients and growing market share should create synergies with our individual goals and personal lives. Again, allowing us to evolve our vision as intentions, setting direction — not prescribing a destination. In this instance, we are going to set intentions by broadening our client perspective. This broader perspective allows us to avoid boundaries that might erode our individual and collective paths to success.

I thoroughly enjoy considering and discussing the complex programs and projects that AEC professionals serve. Like many of you, this enjoyment has allowed me to grow from technical roles into leadership positions with increasing business development (BD) responsibilities, realizing along the way that I am not a natural salesperson. Yet, I benefit from and continue to enjoy working with exceptional marketing, BD, and operations colleagues, who help me to refine my approach to winning work and providing stellar client services. Along the way, one of these wonderful colleagues introduced me to Heidi Gardner’s book.

Mrs. Gardner’s extended title necessitates a deeper read: “Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.” I would not suggest taking on silos as a path toward exceptional client services. However, I wholeheartedly support her guidance, which promotes zippered relationships, allowing us to avoid cross-selling gaps as we orchestrate collaborative selling objectives. Silos emerge for reasons that we need to understand, especially where Wall Street-driven performance metrics and commercialization of our products create onerous metrics for hit rates, profit, loss, and utilization. We must explore ways to incrementally feed these metrics, concurrently exposing colleagues whose breadth of knowledge and desire to grow create mutually beneficial opportunities — opportunities where our collective experiences provide a premium experience for our clients.

Like any dynamic problem, the complexities associated with artfully incentivizing internal and external clients necessitate an elegant approach. I believe that sustained stellar client services starts with a people-centric program management approach, marrying a comprehensive stakeholder assessment with dynamic communication loops throughout the project delivery lifecycle.

Step 1: Understanding and supporting your internal and external clients

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