The last class of the Continuing Professional Development put on by the Engineers Foundation of Ohio came in the form of two breakout sessions. I attended, “Marketing Your Professional Engineering Services.” Dr. Lynn Daily, professor of marketing at Capital University, gave the class. All in all, these are decent tips for any company.

The notes I took from this are as follows:

As competition moves from a single supplier to many suppliers of a service, companies follow a progression of concepts:

• Product Concept: Make what you want to make.
• Selling Concept: Convince people that they want what you make.
• Marketing Concept: Find customer, figure out what customer wants, and make what the customer wants.

Retail vs. Commercial: Retail is using a product for one’s own service, while commercial is using a product to sell one’s own services.

In order to sell services in a highly competitive atmosphere, a company may choose to participate in only certain market segments. Segments can (perhaps should) be measured even before a product is created. For example, outdoor magazine subscriptions may be an indicator of how popular your outdoor product may be. Segments should be measurable, substantial (sufficiently profitable), accessible, differentiable (responds differently to different product mixes), and actionable (able to be served effectively).

Understanding target segments is key. Find out how customers research and decide to handle their problems. People spend more time searching for a solution as their involvement and risk go up. If they already have an answer in mind (and your goal is to be in their mind), they won’t spend as much time searching. Determine what evaluative criteria the target uses.

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Don’t wait until the job is done to provide good customer service. Sometimes a mistake can be turned into a gain, if you recover from that mistake and compensate in more than just a satisfactory manner. Employees must be empowered to do those kind of recoveries.

Implement a client database if you haven’t already, including contact info, decision makers, previous issues, buy practices, and opportunities you could address.

Take all complaints seriously; if one bothers to complain, more than likely other people have been dissatisfied and just haven’t bothered to tell you.

When differentiating yourself from your competitors, note your points of parity, which are attributes you share, and points of difference, positive attributes about you that a client could not find in your competition.  Position your company with these attributes, showing the customer how he can benefit from your superior attribute.

Expertise is highly variable and can’t be stored. People should be selected, highly trained, and highly motivated. Consider performance-based compensation.

“Avoiding Hot Spots” was a lecture given by Luther L. Liggett, Jr., and Douglas L. Shevelow, of Bricker & Eckler, Attorneys at Law.

The State of Ohio Engineers and Surveyors Board confers and revokes Professional Engineering licenses, and they also have the power to prosecute people who practice engineering without a license. P.E.s typically represent the owner and, where there is a risk to others, the public. Although P.E. License law is less complex than most, people can still fall into one more pitfalls:

1. When working on a project, an engineer must be employed by the owner of the project or the company that is going to build the project (called a “design-build” service). These are the only ways an engineer can have access to the total body of knowledge required to do the job. They cannot be hired by a subcontractor. This generated a lot of discussion in class, as this situation comes up frequently but it is not enforced. The presenter said that the enforcement hotline is anonymous, and anyone can call, whether it is competition, an angry employee, or someone else.
2. Engineers can and should vote. They have a First Amendment right to donate to the candidate of their choice. Their firm can be hired by a public official, as long as the public official uses Qualifications Based Selection to choose the best (not necessarily cheapest) solution. Neither a P.E. nor the spouse of a P.E. can contribute in a situation where the P.E. gets unbid contracts. Gifts to public officials should be nominal, and nothing of “undue influence.” The current generally acceptable level is $75. Go over that, for example, with some golf outings, and the Ethics Commission can be called in.  A violation of ethics law is a criminal offense.
3. Materials testing is practicing engineering in Ohio. Materials are being tested to see if they will meet the needs of the situation, and the engineer must know what those needs are.
4. Liggett recommended that engineering firms not submit proposals for competitive bid, and that they should submit their proposals for Qualifications Based Selection. By allowing proposals to be bid, price becomes the overriding concern, and engineering becomes a commodity.
5. Firms that employ engineers should have a Certificate of Authorization from the State of Ohio Engineers and Surveyors Board. One or more full-time partners, officers, or other high-level personnel must be designated as being responsible for the professional engineering services of the firm.


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6. There is a 15 year general warranty for contracts that do not have special warranty clauses. Contracts are required by law to specify liquidated damages. When writing up a contract with a contractor, make sure the damage reflects the per diem you the owner is going to suffer, such as lost revenue, if what you want done is to be late. Contracts can’t penalize in order to teach a lesson — those types of penalties are unenforceable. Contracts can contain a bonus clause if the contractor finishes early, which is useful motivation. Indemnification clauses shift a lot of risk from owners to contractors, and this is particularly advisable if there is more than one contractor on a job.
7. The owner is responsible for telling the contractor where the utilities are for a location. It’s not hard to ask utility companies where the utilities are at.
8. Some charter corporations have a “home rule” that is different than a municipality or state law.
9. Engineer plans that have more than one stamp are usually difficult to determine which work each engineer did.  Multiple-stamp plan violations are aggressively pursued by the Board. If an engineer is using another engineer’s sealed work, he shouldn’t seal it with his own seal. If a seal is needed, the project should be redrawn and resealed.
10. If an anonymous call is investigated by the Board, the Board cannot tell you who complained or if the investigation is dropped. You do get notified if you’re indicted.

The last session of the first day, it didn’t help my interest level that there wasn’t as much new material in “The Fundamental Keys of Success for Every Engineering Firm” as in the other classes.  Brad Bennett, Esq., did his best. He talked about sole proprietorships, LLCs, S-Corporations and C-Corporations.

While he was talking about the application process, he threw out a stat: 20% of an application may be false.  People tend to puff up their resumes. Look for “power words.” Oh, you managed? What did you manage? Oh, you mean you scheduled employees? Did you decide the schedule?  Oh, you mean you wrote the names on the board. Thanks.

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Ohio has a reference check law that protects a person who is asked for a character reference as long as the reference isn’t discriminatory. People giving references still must be cautious: if you give a lot of detail during one reference, you need to be consistent in giving detail to other people who call for references.

It is permissible to check backgrounds for convictions but not for arrests. Arrests inadvertently bias the sample to certain races. In certain occupations, the nature of the conviction can be especially relevant: it is reasonable for a bodyguard company to mandate clean assault records, or for accounting services to require records free of theft or embezzlement.

Credit reports can be checked. If the credit report causes the employer not to hire the applicant, the employer needs to send the applicant a letter stating the situation.

In the Employee Handbook, don’t list all the behaviors that can get an employee fired.  If the list is long enough, a judge may determine that the list limits the number of behaviors that are firing offenses.

The class ended with a brief overview of how to deal with personality types at work.

Lori Torriero returned in the afternoon Thursday to talk about investigations in the work place.

Whenever there is an accusation of wrongdoing, it is a mistake to rush off and confront the person. Unless there is a pressing need, such as theft or danger, the first thing to do is to plan and perform an investigation. Done right, investigations avoid liability, impose discipline, and improve company performance.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using either in-house personnel or external personnel.  External personnel avoids an appearance of bias, and internal personnel have experience in the tasks that need to be performed.

Investigations can’t be kept secret, so don’t try. Keep it factual and impartial. If and once you have a case of harassment, the law says the action must be remedial and effective.  If a co-worker tells you they are being harassed, you have to report it or take action if you’re a manager, even if the employee tells you not to take action.

If you as a manager have to put a person on administrative leave, remind the person that he or she is still an employee still needs to follow what management wants, such as reporting back to work.

While interviewing the person making the accusation, ask:

• What do you think you saw or heard?
• Who else saw it?
• Who else should have been there?

Private sector employees can’t be polygraphed, but public sector employees can.  The presenter doubted the usefulness of polygraphs. The private sector employee can be informed that they need to answer truthfully upon insubordination; the public sector employee has Fifth Amendment protections.

In Ohio, recordings are legal if one of the parties in the interview is aware they are being recorded. A third party cannot record the interview without the consent of either party. An interviewee may refuse to be recorded, but the interviewer can then say that notes will be used, and it will be a matter of he-said-she-said. Written statements prior to the interview are a good thing to get.

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During the interview, ask pointed questions in order to get a story that makes sense.  Don’t leave the judge who is reviewing your information a year or so after the incident with pieces that need to be put together. Schedule time after the interview to fill in voids, such as body language and impressions.  If you don’t feel the interviewee was truthful, write down the objective cues that gave you the hint.

Documentation is most important. Date and number pages.  Xerox appropriate pages of company policy, because the handbook may change. Be aware of immediate and potential audiences, and be as factual as possible. Keep investigation files separate from personal files until the incident is closed; then they can go into the personal file.

Anybody can sue. The lawyer always gets paid. The difference is whether you win or lose.

PatentlyO, a blog that discusses patent law, has an article about a Halliburton patent application that patents methods for someone to get a patent even though someone else did the research.

The purpose does seem funny, but I wonder if we have some people in our law department that remember the fiasco regarding foam fracturing.

Halliburton was the first in the oilfield services industry to offer foam fracturing service. Instead of fracturing with just liquid, we introduce either nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas to generate bubbles and reduce the amount of water used to flood the formation. Foam fracturing is particularly useful in water-sensitive and low pressure lithologies. Most foams I pumped in Duncan ran around 65-70% gas (v/v).

As I was told by my first boss, HAL has the patent to pump foam fluids with 42% or greater of nitrogen gas or carbon dioxide gas. Our competition figured out a way around our patent, by pumping foams with two gases, each less than 42%. Thus we couldn’t keep a total lock on the foam fracturing market.

Fortunately for us single foam technology is superior: there’s less equipment, less complexity in the foam design, and greater ability to design the foam for what it is supposed to do.

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The previous generation of HAL data collection hardware was an RS/6000 AIX-based system that was very network friendly. One could easily hook two data acquisition trucks together and broadcast the job for high-profile work. One truck could also easily tell the other truck what to do by logging into the other truck and issuing terminal commands.

One service supervisor was learning the software in an intensive, 3 day, 12 hour/day class. The class had four of these systems networked together. Since I had worked with Unix-like computers in college, he asked me for some cool things he could do to the other people learning the system.

Well, I said, you could telnet to the other machine and run commands. If you did that, then typed in a command like warn "Have a nice day!", you could pop up a red box on their screen wishing them a good day.

The next day, he came back.  “Dan, I did something.”

Uh oh.

“We were in the middle of a practice session, and everyone was recording data like they were on the job. It was a really long job, and I was bored, so I telnetted to a friend’s machine, like you said, and typed:”

shutdown -h now

Which performed an immediate shutdown of the poor guy’s machine. Fortunately after the initial shock they thought it was a fun prank. Of course, he promised never to do it again.

The Northeast typically has smaller locations around its wells, and so smaller equipment is required. The teardrop bulk trucks carry less cement in each pod, and the pump trucks tend to have just one pump per truck. These were taken at the field camp in Homer City, PA.

This morning I drove to Wooster, OH, the nearest HAL facility to my house. The GPS took me through some state roads, skipping rush hour through Columbus. Several roads had highway workers clearing rubbish, and it was probably fortuitous I didn’t start out earlier. The facility here has been without power since 4pm yesterday. I found a Starbucks to pull into and check email. The camp has been promised that power will be up today.

Prayers extend especially to my friends in Houston and Conroe, especially Memorial Lutheran Church and School, who just underwent major renovations, and St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Conroe.

Hurricane Ike Track, 9/11/08

Stay safe and ready to serve.

Each one of us has more than one vocation with its set of duties. Looking at them through the Law, I realize just how badly I perform in each one of them. Looking through the Gospel, I see the stuff that I get to do, and I thank God.

My set, in no particular order: Husband. Father. Employee. Citizen. Redeemed sinner. Blogger? You choose to read this, so maybe.

Our vocations have a theological component: this is how God takes care of his children.

Sometimes our vocations work together. As an employee, I work and collect a paycheck, and that money goes to pay for house, food, vehicle, health care, and the like. The church gets an offering (sorry, mine’s not 10%), and the state gets more than its share.

Tug of War -- Credit: Pitlochry Highland Games

Other times our vocations contend against one another. I could argue that I would serve my family better, for example, if I didn’t pay the property tax. That would be a nice sum of money that could go towards therapy. Or perhaps if I falsified my expenses and caused HAL to cut me a nice reimbursement check for things not actually charged. Or perhaps if I didn’t kick something into the offering plate on Sunday, without having set up those automatic payments through Thrivent. You’d say I was crazy. You’d be right. Even if I did those things and didn’t get arrested or fired, they are still evil things to do. They violate God’s order: even that lack of tithing.

While we don’t serve any of our vocations perfectly, we have to do our best to serve them all. We only get to “sin boldly” and “rejoice in Christ even more boldly” if we try to do what’s right.

I do not envy the politician. Elected by his constituency, he strives to make policy that benefits them. Unfortunately, local benefits can come at the cost of the government he serves in. When that happens, he harms the country to benefit his district or state. For every Bridge to Nowhere and Mississippi railroad rework, there are thousands of buildings and grants — and those are just the ones with a government official’s name on them. We forget that the government by the people and for the people, is ultimately of the people, and these entitlements come at the cost of everyone.

My vocations collide too. The jury may be out as to whether I am a worse husband at home or away from home. At home I’m a better father but a terrible employee, until we get training by teleconferencing going. I will likely have to fill out an absentee ballot to discharge the duty of my citizenship. My church attendance doesn’t exactly match my high school attendance record.

I don’t justify any of this, but justification is not one of my callings. I have to, or I get to, serve all of my vocations as best as I can, and let God do the justification.