Engineering for the Future

Iver Skavdal has reengineered Winzler & Kelly into a firm with national expertise and a local feel.

    “Forget everything you know about engineering firms.”  This is the first line on the website for Winzler & Kelly Consulting Engineers, a Santa Rosa-based engineering firm that’s upgraded its approach from a traditional, one-specialty firm into a multidimensional, multidisciplinary firm that not only delivers a range of services to clients, but also specializes in numerous markets and reaches a wide geographical area.

    What was started in 1951 as a small firm specializing in the water and wastewater markets, and in support of the timber and fishing industries in Eureka by John Winzler and his father, George, the county surveyor, has evolved over the years. During a major flood in 1955, John called a high school friend, Bob Kelly, to help them with an overload of work, and the firm soon became known as Winzler, Winzler & Kelly. After George Winzler passed away in 1964, the name was shortened to Winzler & Kelly. Today, it’s a robustly growing firm with gross revenues of approximately $54 million and about 310 employees in 10 offices, including Eureka, Santa Rosa, San Francisco, San Jose, Pleasanton, Sacramento, Anaheim and San Diego; Portland, Oregon, and two Micronesian offices in Guam an Saipan. There are plans to open an office in the Inland Empire and another outside of California (the location is yet to be determined) this year.

    “When [the timber and fishing] economies started to falter in the 1970s, John Winzler realized he needed to push out of Eureka,” explains Iver Skavdal, current president and CEO of Winzler & Kelly, who started with the firm in 1977 as an intern. “So, around 1980, he opened offices in Santa Rosa and San Francisco through acquiring other firms.”

    Skavdal credits a lot of his knowledge of doing business in a difficult economy—and his drive for growing a company—to his early experience with the firm. “I went to work there right at the beginning of what was essentially the end, right when the market and economy of Humboldt County was declining,” says Skavdal. “At that time, Winzler & Kelly had nearly 75 people in the Eureka office and, as I came into the company, people were [being laid off]. That’s when I gained my drive for growing a company. I learned that businesses really only tend to go one of two directions: growing or shrinking.”

    In 1993, while Iver Skavdal was managing the Santa Rosa office, he went into business with Winzler, Kelly and five new shareholders, under the direction of CEO Jack Goble. After Goble’s untimely death in 2002, Skavdal took over the role of president and CEO. This marked the next phase in the firm’s development, as Skavdal used an alternate leadership style to take the company in a different direction.

A new direction

    “Both John Winzler and Jack Goble were what I call the ‘single, strong leader model,’” explains Skavdal. “They had very strong personalities, were decisive and ruled by strong will. When I became CEO, I felt it was necessary for me and my staff to build more infrastructure in the leadership group.”

    In 2002, the firm had a president, CFO and office managers; the corporate structure has since changed to include a president, COO, CFO, a human resources director, a corporate business officer and a corporate development officer. And while it’s still privately held, it offers its employees a robust internal ownership structure. About one in 10 employees have chosen to become owners.

    Over the years, the firm has expanded not only its internal organizational structure and size, but also the services it offers and the markets it reaches. Winzler & Kelly prides itself on the fact that it does everything short of construction, including: civil, electrical, mechanical and structural engineering; construction management; surveying; sustainable building design; and environmental services including hazardous materials assessments, remediation, monitoring, environmental planning, CEQA/NEPA (California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act), biological services and geological services.

    Skavdal jokes that it’s easier to list what the firm does not offer—namely, architectural or geotechnical services.

    Its markets have also expanded exponentially. Today, it covers eight markets including water, federal government, industrial (such as manufacturing and processing), education, municipal and local government, justice (such as prisons through the Department of Corrections), state government (including state parks, the Department of General Services and Caltrans) and urban renewal/sustainable development, which primarily entails redevelopment work for inner cities.

People skills

    Obviously, having been in business for close to 60 years and continually expanding its operations, the firm is doing something right. Skavdal attributes much of this success not only to the firm’s diversity in services and markets and its geographical reach, but, almost more important, to its people. Not only does it work hard to recruit and retain talented individuals, but the firm ensures all of its employees are experts in more than one area, so they can move between services and markets. This not only ensures employees can move into other disciplines during downturns in certain areas of the economy (versus having to lay anybody off), but also maximizes each individual’s potential, thereby maximizing the potential of the firm.

    “A lot of our employees are cross-trained to move in and out of any particular market    and any particular service,” explains Skavdal. “For example, last year we probably had six full-time people checking building plans for our municipal clients. Today, we have none, because that service essentially went away with the housing market. Like everybody else, we were impacted by the downturn in housing. But we kept all of those employees; they just shifted into different services and aspects of our business.”

    Company-wide, Winzler & Kelly has organized itself by the services it offers and the markets it serves, rather than geographically. That way, it can easily pool resources and expertise at any of its 10 offices, rather than having each office act individually. The result?

    “We can still provide the local connection, which is important to us,” explains Skavdal. “At the same time, rather than being 10 30-person offices, we can approach a client with 300 people. We can still be the local 30-person firm, and compete in the local marketplace, yet we can compete against the national players for larger projects.”
This has become a major selling point to clients.

    “I work with Winzler & Kelly because it provides me with big company experience that rivals the kind of firms we have in the Bay Area and nationwide, and yet its employees are knowledgeable about local issues, local politics and local constraints that let me make sure I can get my projects built,” states Dan Carlson, capital projects coordinator for the City of Santa Rosa. “The firm and its people know how to get things done at the local level.”

    This investment in employees goes beyond cross-training to maximize their potential. For Winzler & Kelly, it also means being the best employer possible. Due to a combination of rising numbers of retirees and declining numbers of new engineering graduates, engineering firms have to offer their employees more if they expect to recruit and retain the best. Therefore, Winzler & Kelly offers competitive salaries with quarterly bonuses and incentive programs; great benefits including health care, a 401(k) with significant matching, life insurance, long- and short-term disability insurance; and an educational reimbursement program, just to name a few, as well as an ownership program. It also hosts special events such as crab feeds and makes tickets to local baseball games and amusement parks available to employees and their families, as well as supports employee efforts in various philanthropic activities.

    “We have a very strong commitment to our employees, and we think they return that to us through their investment back into our clients,” says Skavdal. “We believe we’re the best employer to work for in our industry, and we demonstrate that every day to our employees.”

Kudos

    The industry seems to agree; the firm was honored for the fifth year in a row as one of the nation’s top 50 best firms to work for by CE News. In 2007, it ranked number four out of all “mid-level” civil engineering firms and number nine out of all civil engineering firms in the country.

    Not only have these accolades been good for the firm’s employees and its recruitment and retention efforts, but also for the community at large. As a firm, Winzler & Kelly is very active in the community, but it also takes the lead from its employees. As Skavdal comments, “If an employee is passionate about a cause, the firm is involved, too.” This has led the firm to be involved in many different organizations and events, from Becoming Independent to Rebuilding Together to the Boys & Girls Club to Relay for Life and more.

    “Certainly, all businesses place clients first, because the revenue flows from the clients,” says Skavdal. “But, we believe that by supporting our employees’ interests and creating an environment where professionals can thrive—where they really want to work—then they’ll take care of the clients.”

    The dearth of client complaints over the years has validated this management strategy to Skavdal and has helped him overcome one of his biggest challenges—namely, attracting top talent to high-priced Sonoma County.

    “We’re a growing company. We need people and we recruit people from all across the country,” says Skavdal. “The fact that the local colleges don’t have professional engineering programs adds to the problem. If people from Sonoma County want to get an engineering degree, they have to go to college somewhere else. You can’t get that at Sonoma State. And it’s hard to get those people back once they leave to get their education.”

    Another major reason the firm has been successful, says Skavdal, has been its flexibility and ability to change in shifting markets. As the nation has become more aware of new environmental and conservation practices, for example, the firm has remained on the forefront of environmental engineering and planning services. Today, Winzler & Kelly offers everything from site surveys and investigations to permitting and regulatory approval. It keeps environmental specialists on staff including biologists, geologists, industrial hygienists, environmental permit specialists and field technicians.

    Hand-in-hand with Winzler & Kelly’s environmental services is the foundation of the firm—its water resources group, which includes groundwater, drinking water, recycled water, wastewater and storm water systems including storage, conveyance and treatment.

It’s in the water

    “We do a lot of work in the water market,” says Skavdal. “Locally, we were very active in the Geyser Pipeline project—a reclaimed water project [see “Full Steam Ahead,” Feb. 2008]. We’re also doing a lot of master planning, engineering and environmental documentation for the City of Santa Rosa’s recycled water program, which will bring reclaimed water into the City of Santa Rosa for use on parks and commercial sites.”

    Although the city hasn’t yet started design and construction of this project, Winzler & Kelly has completed all of the advance planning and environmental work.

    “The water market is going to be huge,” predicts Skavdal. “There’s no new water sources, so people need to be smarter about how they use the water we have. Our water is actually coming from efficiencies just in how we use it—conservation, from desalination of oceans and recycling water we’ve already consumed once [reclaimed water]. That’s a huge market that requires a whole new infrastructure system to be built throughout the country—different pumps, different pipelines, different storage systems—to deliver this new source of water throughout communities.”

Looking forward

    Due to California’s chronic water shortages, Skavdal believes the state will be on the forefront of this new and growing market, and Sonoma County is a leader already. Beyond water, all areas of environmental practices are growing as we trend toward sustainable materials and building practices that lessen our impact on our environment. Not only are more engineering and development firms offering these services, more clients are demanding them.

    “A lot of our clients are interested in the environment and are looking for better, cleaner construction practices and greener building,” says Skavdal.

    “There’s also a lot of waste associated with construction and demolition, so recycling and reuse of construction products is important. All developments and projects are going to have to start looking at their impact on climate change—that’s another new emerging market for us. We can do the analysis on the impact on climate change associated with projects so we can help our clients understand how to better manage their projects.”

    So while it’s inevitable that Winzler & Kelly will achieve more and more national recognition, it’s just as expected that the firm will continue being a good neighbor and playing a key role in the growth of our local economy. Now that’s smart growth.