Goodbye start-up Director, hello blogger

When I announced I was quitting my well-paid executive job, working for a high-growth start-up, in my dream field of renewable energy, many people were surprised. I had family members who were quite worried about my sanity. I had coworkers who didn’t talk to me for a bit. The last 4 years were packed with rapid success, both in terms of company and personal career growth. Why would I leave that?

There was a similar mixture of incredulity and “good for you”s when I left my first stable, reputable job after three years. But for me, it’s always about the big picture. Then, I wanted to be in an industry I believed in. Now, I want to see what else I am capable of. How can I be more helpful to society in general? And, can I create a healthier balance in my personal life?

“What are you going to do next?” was the most frequent question I got asked. My answer? simply put: consult, and write more.

A strong engineering foundation

My first, real, exposure to consulting was in 2011. That summer, I worked at a mine, learning from an assortment of the mine’s staff as well as their primary consultant. The following summer, I worked for another consulting firm on various mining and environmental projects. Upon graduating university with a civil engineering degree, I soon signed up with yet another engineering consulting firm. As I learned the ropes from my mentors there, I began to dream of one day running my own company.

This dream was always several years away…

I needed to have to have ‘x’ years of experience first. Would need to do this, or that, before I’d be ready. And most importantly, I would need a good business idea for a jumping off point. So I started a list of start-up ideas that included friends’ and colleague’s input, like modular saunas and a lego cocktail bar. Every time I or someone around me would say “there should be…” or, “why isn’t there a…”, I’d add it to the list too. My philosophy being, for every 100 bad ideas there’s a good one. In 2021, I finally got to 100 ideas, but I didn’t think any of them were “good enough” to take the start-up risk.

The Resource Industry

Working in the Canadian primary resource industry early on in my career, exposed me to the giant machine that runs a large portion of Canada’s economy. Combined with my middle-class Vancouverite education and upbringing, this experience set a baseline for my perspective on work in general. I’m the first person to admit my own bias, and I know my view on the workplace is not the only one. But here are some things I’ve encountered.

I saw mining, energy, and infrastructure projects all following a similar formula: workers seen as dollar and hour amounts on a spreadsheet. Too many workers unhappy, burned out (or soon to be), or suffering from substance abuse. Sometimes a combination of these. Spending days, weeks, months, away from home and loved ones. When the weekend or day’s off finally roll around, it’s a wild party.

Now, not everyone swings on that pendulum, but when you are caught up in it things can certainly seem that way. I recall my coworkers who politely keep to themselves, and how they would end up as the butt of everyone else’s jokes. Not mattering if you are the most skilled at, or passionate about, the job at hand. Different labeled as weird, and weird often attracting ridicule.

Work as a means to an end

For most, work is merely a necessary requirement for some other cause. Maybe it’s getting that car you want, or affording rent, or paying for child support. For some, the job is about ego, or living up to some strange expectation. Others, it’s just a revenue stream for their livelihood. Sure, there are people who love what they do, or at least that’s what they say. In this line of work, the ones I know who seem to love what they do the most, are retired already or are running the firm.

The need for efficiency and making dollars count constantly outweighs the possibility of doing things better by doing them differently. Everyone works through weekends stressing about timelines, even though projects are constantly being delayed. Ingenuity in engineering is in doing what was done historically, but faster, with less materials, and at a lower cost. These are facts I learned not to question. Once I asked a partner in a firm about the company’s appetite for renewable energy projects. His response was simply “no, there’s no money in that.”

Trials of inefficiency

On the job, every project is multi-disciplinary. From different organizations in one company, to the various stakeholders in a venture. Government agencies, First Nations, consultants, and contractors. Finance, operations, engineers, and technicians. Each different team and individual holding their own perspectives, biases, experiences where they’ve been burned and where they’ve succeeded. Put all these opposing forces together and it’s amazing to think about how much human society has been able to accomplish. It’s also no wonder infrastructure projects take so long.

How many times have you gone by a construction site, seen 10 people standing around and one person digging a hole. Then heard someone voice, or thought yourself, something along the lines of: “really, this is what my taxes are going towards?”.

What most people don’t see, are the underlying reasons why we need that many people standing around. When we talk about infrastructure projects, public health and safety is paramount. Mistakes can cost lives. And so, little inefficiencies add up to an obscene amount of overhead, and it’s not simple calculus to change that. There are a ton of talented, knowledgeable, and experienced workers. Their individual abilities are not what make projects so inefficient. It’s the systems we use to structure our teams, our organizations, and our companies that get in the way.

For example:

The straightforward site investigation task of soil testing needs multiple layers of supervision. All involved parties of expertise, jurisdiction, and contractual role on the project, need representation. Much of the supervision is actually done by inexperienced field staff, who then report back to multiple levels of project managers and senior engineers. Sometimes those senior managers will come to site for training purposes, adding even more people. Each specialty piece of equipment is ran by a different, trained, expert. And so on. If something is missed, ignored, measured incorrectly, catastrophic failure can occur years later out of seemingly nowhere.

Chasing someone else’s dream

The pool of companies and individuals with particular expertise is limited. Each project typically needs a combination of companies contributing to the outcomes. Reputation precedes everyone. The cheap consultant. The cowboy contractor. The expensive, but trustworthy operator. Expectations are laid before the shovels hit the dirt, and lack of trust breeds miscommunication in the chasms between project sub-teams. Resulting in the need for re-work, additional supervision, and waiting, lots of waiting.

Numerous entrepreneurs are leaving their engineering and industry jobs to try and solve these problems with software and technology. But tech is not immune to mistrust and failed communication.

As I moved into the start-up and technology realm, I’ve witnessed how these hurdles continue and only intensify as the competition for capital goes up. Sure, the hypothetical of a yet-to-be-proven business gets away with a lot of hand-waving, and the digital realm has much less implication to health and safety (as we currently measure it). But still, instead of smart people spending the majority of their time solving hard, important, problems and innovating… companies and teams spend their resources on measuring processes and reporting instead of achieving impact and success. There’s more concern with making sure insurance is covered and legal implications avoided than there is with executing on project deliverables.

Start-up and keep up

In 2017, I moved from conventional engineering consulting into the world of renewable energy start-ups. As employee number 1 at a Vancouver-based wave energy company, my day-to-day spanned just about everything. Building the business plan and financial model; pitching to angel investors and potential customers; applying for grants; numerical modeling, and testing the product; managing partners, recruitment, and projects.

A year after that, I was recruited to join a young cleantech firm on ready to rocket’s list. I would be the first hire and second member of the newly formed Customer Success team. Here I discovered, contrary to my previously held belief from consulting, solutions don’t have to be a choice between impact and employee satisfaction​.

This company valued inclusion and diversity to the core, and made it a pillar of their business model. Over three years, I grew the team of engineers, analysts, and project managers from 2 to 30. Implementing the methods and structure necessary to achieve excellence in the high-pressure, rapid growth environment. We applied many of these practices across the rest of the company. Near the end of 2021, I was brought into the company’s executive team to expand what we had done in customer success to the wider business and get to the next level as an organization.

Not all unicorns make rainbows

One day, I was having a conversation with a colleague also in cleantech. He asked me “what do you think of [the company’s new] direction?”. I remember replying, “the goal is to minimize humankind’s impact on the planet, by maximizing impact as a company. But I wish we could be happy with 90% of our potential impact instead of reaching for 110%. 90% of the way there is still really positive for fighting climate change, and I believe we can accomplish that without crushing employees beneath us.”

This conversation lingered with me for several months, and helped me get into the mindset of: wait, what if instead of starting a company that was poised for hyper-growth, I “just” tried to create a sustainable business? What if I applied my expertise to multiple mission-driven companies, rather than just one?

Most people I‘ve spoken with in start-up land, whether that be founders, employees, or investors, don’t consider doing less than 110%. It’s growth, growth, growth. Boom and bust. Always jumping to that next hot technology. Conversely, when I speak with those in more traditional companies, it’s all about knowing the risk, mitigating chances of error, following precedents, and maintaining the order of things.

There are lots of opportunities for joining dinosaurs, or unicorns, but what if you want to just be a human? Maybe what we need are more humans to help dinos join the new age, and assist unicorns in breaking free of their fantasy shackles. Most start-up companies fail, after all.

In conclusion

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that I had over 100 bad ideas for a start-up. I don’t need to come up with my own brilliant idea. Instead, I’ll continue to share my knowledge, expertise, and skill with people who have better ones.

In this crazy time we live in, life is too short to worry about the little things. To quote one of my wisest’s mentors, we should all “Stop worrying. When you worry, it’s either all for nothing, or you just end up suffering twice.” Yes, we have infinite problems to solve. Climate change, social injustice, economic disparity, mental health. Ecosystems are dying. Countries are warring. More children are thrown into the streets of chaos every day. You may ask yourself “what’s the point?” in trying to solve these massive problems. But if there are infinite problems, that means there are infinite solutions to be found. Ask instead, “why not try something today?”

I’ve only just started my journey as an entrepreneur, and I know I have countless mistakes to make and lessons to learn. I look forward to sharing more stories, perspectives, and discussions with you all, as we make positive contributions to society and better the planet for future generations​, together.