Springfield Business Journal_2019-03-25

Architects & Engineers Read all about it MARCH 25 COMING NEXT Sam Dryer Managing Director Mutual of Omaha Engineers are not by nature risk takers. Our quality of life is influenced by the caliber of work performed by these professionals. Don’t take them for granted. PRESENTED BY Presented by: SPRINGFIELD BUSINESS JOURNAL · 11 MARCH 25-31, 2019 through a big cycle, the city did, over the last several years of relining all the old sewer pipes. They went through a big study to determine how much infiltration they were getting into the pipes, and they identified that was significant. With lin- ing it, they can get some more years out of the plant. You’ve got the communities, like St. Louis and Kansas City ... where they’re getting requirements and they had consent decrees come down on it or they had to fix their sewer system where they have combined sewers and it’s, you know, it’s astronomical compared with what our community is faced with fixing. Toth: The electric grid, you hear on TV or in newspapers, the aging electric infrastructure, it’s not true. The electric grid is stronger than it’s ever been nationwide. After the big blackout in the Northeast 15 years ago, there were a lot of national standards that went in where reliability now drives the market. In the past, you would build infrastructure to serve a load. Now, a lot of the infrastruc- ture in the country is being built for in- creased reliability. A lot of infrastructure now is being built to hook up new wind farms in this area, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, and bring that power to the grid. If you think back 15, 20 years, people saw more power outages; 30, 40 years, people in rural areas, if they had an outage, people would expect the pow- er to be out for a few days. Now, a blink is unacceptable. There are these power pools or independent system operators that oversee an area, and when they do their studies and say that an area needs to be upgraded for reliability reasons, there’s a mechanism to pay for it. Freeman: Wastewater bills in most towns are under $50. You get to Kansas City and St. Louis, with all the consent de- crees, and it’s upwards of $100 a month. But in southwest Missouri, we’re still don’t pay much. It would be tough for us to go in there and say, hey, we want you to spend essentially an electric bill. I would like a day where I could sit here like Adam and say, “I feel like the sewer grid is strong.” When we have a sewer backup, it’s getting fixed right away instead of somebody’s house gets filled with sewage and they call the city and it’s reactive. Toth: Our country runs on electricity, and it’s where our country’s put its priori- ties. We work with clients that if their industry sees a blink, let’s say that they have a factory that makes food, they see a blink and they’ve got to clean out all their equipment, everything is wasted that day. It’s a major expense. Brady: The deal with electric is it’s a nationwide grid. Stormwater is all con- nected. But potable water and sewer, those are all individual. Toth: You look across the country, the most expensive electric utility to the cheapest, it may be 2-to-1. In Springfield, you have 5-to-1 cost differences on sewer. On the horizon Olson: What are the growth plans? Any- thing new happening at your offices? Brady: We’ve had quite a bit of growth last year. We grew about 33 percent in employees. We went from about 90 to 120 in 2018. Springfield is our headquar- ters, so all the admin and all those things that go along with that growth, those are all housed here. We probably ran out of space about two years ago. Our new facility is going to be great for us. Last year, we opened two new offices. This year, we’re hoping we stabilize a little bit. We’ve acquired three different firms. We just acquired a small firm in Destin, Florida, at the end of last year. We’re always looking for opportunities. Rasmussen: We’re constantly looking for new opportunities to grow. Right now, we have 30 offices in eight different states across mostly the Midwest. In this area, we’re just trying to backfill where we have offices and try to grow those offices and try to build that footprint. We went through a rebranding effort over the last year where we changed our name and got rid of the Associates at the end. Toth: Our company is trying to establish ourselves as a market player in the north- west over the next few years. That’s our biggest growth opportunity right now. Sometimes whenever you’re trying to grow in an area, your existing customers think that you don’t care about them any- more. We are not growing at the expense of our existing customers. We have grown because of them. Freeman: Me and my wife had invested in an idea I had before I came to Trekk to build a camera for the sewer. Early on, it was out of necessity for small towns – like we need a way to monitor what’s going on. That led me to the managing partners of Trekk. They were like, hey, we want to invest in your idea by the way, start an office here in Springfield. We’ve invested a ton of money and time and research and development of it and this year could be the year that we com- mercialize it. Next generation Toth: Missouri State [University] having an engineering program here in town has been the best thing for engineering in Springfield. We can find people now. We can have summer interns. It is amazing that we now have a school in our backyard. Rasmussen: I would say that more of our students are coming out of Missouri State than they’re coming out of Rolla, specifically for the reason that we can train them while they’re going to school. From a growth standpoint, it’s probably been the biggest catalyst of growth in this market – the ability to find quality people. Toth: They don’t offer mechanical engi- neering. There’s talk that they’re going to offer mechanical engineering. That will be a big catalyst to the mechanical engineering field. Olson: What are the starting salaries for these graduates? Rasmussen: They’re going up daily. We no longer have a southwest Missouri rate scale, we have a Kansas City rate scale that applies to southwest Missouri. We start our students right now out of school at $57,000. I’ve had clients tell me, why are your fees so high? And I’ve told them, do you know how much a student is out of school? Toth: The electric industry pays more. It’s gone up. Starting wages for electri- cal engineers 15 years ago were about $50,000 to 55,000. Now they’re in the low $70,000s. Freeman: As far as engineers, we’re right at the same level as Olsson. Brady: It’s such a competitive market. When you’re bringing in a student at $57,000, you may have somebody that’s been there a couple of years and they’re just making that now. Rasmussen: We constantly evaluate that every year … compared to their peers in different markets and where we’re see- ing the market overall. Brady: Twenty-plus years ago, when I en- tered the market, starting salary for civil engineers in our area was like $28,000, and now they’re double that. Excerpts from Features Editor Christine Temple,  ctemple@sbj.net . Jared Rasmussen, Olsson Inc.; and Adam Toth, Toth and Associates Inc.