292 - Engineering Success: The Role of Flexibility and Communication in Client Interactions with Wilson & Girgenti's Joseph Girgenti

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Joe Gigente, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a professional engineering design firm and you You have another construction subcontractor, construction company called Wilson and Girgenti, which in the website is wilsongirgenti.com. You fourth-generation Tampa guy, extremely successful businessman. Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Doug.

I know you're a professional engineer. Tell us about how you and your partner, Mr. Wilson, got together and you built this company and grew it to the size that it is today.

Yes. So our origin was not unsimilar to many others. Todd and I were both at the same engineering firm. He was my boss at our previous firm. He's about 15 years older than I. He had been there for many more years than me. I joined when I was a senior in college and I ended up staying full-time. It, it was a, a very reputable firm, very good firm, but not particularly large and not, didn't have much growth didn't really have plans for growth, I'll say. So for someone at the beginning of their career, there's really not a whole lot of space to grow. Todd had reached the pinnacle there and he was ready to move on also. One thing led to another. We started talking, we left, we started our own firm. That was at the, that was towards the end of 2005. We really, I didn't know anybody at that point. I was locked in the back doing production work. Todd had all the customer relations. Turns out lots of people liked working with him. And when they heard that we were out on our own, we we started getting a lot of phone calls. And then it really, I rode his coattails while we started the business. And the trade-off was always going to be that I was his retirement plan. And so somewhere around 2018, I would say we started to get to that point where his kids were grown. They were out of the house. They were finishing college and he wanted to start slowing down. And I said, man, we got a tiger by the tail here. Let's put the pedal to the metal. And we knew that day would come. And so we enacted our plan and I bought him out at the end of '19. So starting 2020, I bought out his half of the company and I had great growth plans and, and moved forward with a lot of them. And 3 months into that was COVID. Of course, of course, very, very big surprise. I'm proud to say that we went through with the majority of our growth plans and we actually did grow through COVID. It was very painful. That's, that's our origin in a nutshell. I think that what we found along the way through trial and tribulation was our niche, our market, which is we say we do small and medium-sized projects on a large scale is how we market ourselves.

When you talk about that means you do a, a higher volume, smaller projects on a higher volume.

Yes.

And you've got how many? I looked at the map on your website. You've got locations all over the Southeast from Austin. I think you go as far west as Austin. You have an office in Austin?

Yes.

Yes. And how many other offices do you have?

There's 6 others. We just recently— we're 4 in Florida, Tampa, Orlando. We're our first in Florida, Jacksonville and South Florida. We're Austin, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee. And recently we opened in New York and Manhattan.

Yeah, I would think that would be an extremely competitive environment, New York City.

It is. We're just starting to get some— get our feet wet. It took a long time to get licensed there, quite frankly. Like so many other things in the business and really even the beginning of Austin and Nashville— I'm sorry, Nashville and Orlando— was it's the people in the business that are building the business. When Todd and I started here in Tampa, the two of the first people that we hired, I think they were employees number— Todd and I were 1 and 2, and then these were employees number 3 and 4. One was Brock Schrader, who's currently our president and now is my partner also. He started and runs Orlando, and then a gentleman who's no longer with us, but Paul Kennedy had started Nashville. They both had roots with us at our previous company. They had left before us. Brock was still in school. He had interned with us and blah, blah, blah. They, we started our business. We were doing side work with them and we wanted to bring them on full time. And they both gave us the same response, which was, yes, we want to join, but we want to stay in our respective cities. Brock was already in Orlando. Paul was already in Nashville. We wanna stay in our respective cities and, and we want to eventually start marketing for work here. And Todd and I said, okay, sounds great. Why not? What do we have to lose? At the beginning, we started just working out of our houses before, before it was the cool thing to do. So it, it's, which is very funny because like through all this COVID stuff, I just feel like I'm looking in, we're just looking into the, we could predict the future. We've been there, we've done that. We've lived through it. We know where it lands. And I think a lot of people are landing where we had landed, which is we did eventually get into an office about 7 or 8 years into the company. We got into an office. For us, what put us over the limit was training. It's very hard to train remotely.

Yeah.

We're in our disciplines of engineering, particularly mechanical and electrical. There are not enough engineers in the construction industry. There's a shortage of mechanical and electrical engineers. So we got to the point where we couldn't hire enough people with experience. We had to start making our own, had to start hiring out of school and training. And that's really when we needed an office space. Wow.

So is that your model today? You're hiring young people who have aptitude and—

Yes, absolutely.

And are they in school studying engineering typically, or?

Yes, we, we almost always have interns. We have summer interns, college kids that are home for the summer or just looking for some experience. Some of them end up working while they're in school. They'll be in school and work with us part-time. Sometimes we'll even, if they've graduated, we'll hire them for an internship as a trial before they go full-time. We even have high school kids that come and intern with us.

Wow.

Um, so yes, absolutely. We're, we plant a lot of seeds. We plant a lot of seeds.

And for most of these kids, are they all interested in, in finally getting their PE designation, getting their license?

That's one of the big questions. That's certainly one of the, that's certainly one of the things that so many people are curious about. The PE license is really only applicable to our industry, to building construction. For all the other aspects of engineering, all the other industries, It's nice. It's a nice thing to have. It's a feather in your cap, but you don't really need it for anything.

And in construction, there are many different kinds of it. You've got structural, electrical, civil. There are a lot of different disciplines and each discipline has its own designation, its own licensing requirements and its own educational requirements.

Yes. Yes, correct. I would say the structural and the civil, which actually structural is a subcategory of civil engineering. I, I wouldn't say there's as much of a shortage in the construction industry. I think it's mostly because if you go to school for civil engineering, there's a very— what do you, what are you going to school for? You're going to be designing sites, you're going to be designing building sites, you're going to be doing land development, you're going to be designing roadways. That's what you're going to school for, right? So you get out of your industry and you go into that type of work. When you go to get a degree, and, and structural is a subcategory of that, Um, there's obviously the structural that is with us is the building itself, but there's a large structural component in civil also for roadways, for bridges.

Right.

That's very structural. I think there's much more, it's much more when you get into those degrees in college, you have a better idea of what you want to get into as a career. For mechanical and electrical engineers, it's quite different. Everybody now wants to, mechanical and electrical engineers, mechanical engineers almost all want to be inventors. Which is awesome that electrical engineers want to work on electronics, artificial intelligence, right? Everybody wants to work for Elon Musk and go to Mars, which is awesome. I do too. I hope Elon listens to this. He needs buildings too. Hopefully he hires us. That's very cool. And the other thing that we definitely struggle with more recently of the last, I would say 5 to 7 years is cybersecurity and companies gobble up engineers. It almost doesn't matter what discipline they graduated with. If it's— they got an engineering degree, they're gobbling them up, which again, I can't complain too much about because we've designed some nice big office spaces for cybersecurity companies.

There you go.

You know, but it leaves a huge void of mechanical and electrical engineers in our industry. So we really have to, we really have to inform young students, young people what we're about. Many of them never even thought of us and then really entice them. We have to really recruit them into our industry.

It sounds like bringing up young people is a real passion of yours.

It absolutely is. I enjoy it. I think that it's— there's business, there's life, there's making a living, and then there's what's the reason behind all of it. Certainly that is a major motivator for me. I want to repopulate our industry. And that's also was a big motivation for a few years ago, about 2 and a half years ago now. Actually getting into construction and building the trades that we design, because that's even on HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and fire sprinkler construction. That's even more lacking than engineering. They're just— we're— the trades are very much in demand. They're very much not as many people coming into it as demand for it. And there's just huge potential. And we— the engineering side of things, we're working on a computer that can be done from a lot of places. But the construction side of things, we have to make our buildings here. You're not outsourcing that. You got to make our buildings here. We have to know how to make our buildings. And then certainly the marriage between the two. To me, engineers were born from builders. And I'm not, I'm saying beyond just, I'm saying beyond actual buildings, but people who've made machinery, people who made things. In our industry, it's become, there's become a big disconnect there. And a lot of engineers. Are designing things that they've never built or don't even know what it looks like or don't even know what it is. And then we're in charge of designing it. What sense does that make? And I see the look on your face. It doesn't make sense. But if you talk to any building contractor, they'll verify that. They'll tell you, yeah, these engineers have drawings that are unbuildable. Exactly. And so we're very much trying to put an end to that. We're trying to basically very much trying to make iron sharpens iron, make each side better from the other.

Yeah. In my earlier life as a trial lawyer, I did a lot of construction litigation. I represented, I just represented everybody, owners, contractors, subcontractors, design professionals.

You've seen the disconnect.

Many times from residential to big-time industrial problems. So I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yes.

And then my job was to help a client sort it all out and figure out who's at fault and why and how much is it going to cost to fix it. You've been at this now for a long time, almost 20 years. What is it that floats your boat, gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

At the beginning, I swore to myself, first of all, everybody in my family is in the medical, in the medical profession. Even my wife's family, everybody's in the medical profession. And my wife's family, I've known almost my entire life. Her brother and I grew up as best friends in the same neighborhood and our little bicycle gangs. And I married my best friend's sister is what happened.

That sounds pretty classic. Yeah.

Yeah. But. So I, I figured I would go into medicine. I, I got a year and a half, year and a half, 2 years into school. It, it wasn't clicking. I was all over the board. I just, I was half in and outta school. I, I, I'd started at the University of Florida up in Gainesville. I came back. I always liked messing with my car. I was always the kid taking everything apart. I started doing some construction work for a family friend who was an electrician. And somewhere in there where my parents were very much pushing me to stay in school while they saw that I was drifting away. And my mother said, well, why don't you look at some engineering classes? And it literally clicked. I said, wow, I never even thought of that. Let me look this up. And I get on USF's website here in our local university in Tampa. And wow, this description sounds really cool. And let me sign up for some classes. And so that immediately took, uh, I swore while I, my degree's in mechanical engineering. I swore while I was getting my degree, I am not going to design HVAC systems. That's the last thing I'm going to do. I swear I'm not. I'm going to design fine Italian sports cars, you know, my Italian heritage. And I think like a lot of mechanical engineers, we love cars. I was certainly into my car and all this good stuff. I think towards the end of my college career, when it was time to pick, to pick where I was gonna go to work, there was two things that drove me into this industry. One is the ability to own my own business. I always knew I wanted to be in business for myself. I, I just, from a very young age, mostly because I just, Didn't like doing what other people told me to do, if I'm being honest. So I always knew I wanted to work for myself. Secondly, I wanted to be able to stay in Tampa. Ironically, that's the part that I was very wrong about. There, I thought that I couldn't go into any other types of engineering in Tampa. I thought that building construction, building design was really my only available option locally in Tampa and to be able to own my own business. I was very wrong about that. There are lots and lots of different types of engineers in the Tampa Bay area. Ironically, I learned about many of them by designing buildings for them after we were already in business. So there's lots of, we got, we have a fair amount of manufacturing. We have a lot of design. We have a massive military base here, MacDill Air Force Base, which has a massive presence of defense contractors. We have Raytheon here locally. We have Lockheed here locally. We have, we've got one of the largest manufacturers of, uh, lightning arresting, lightning protection. It makes sense. We're in Tampa, Florida. It's a lot of lightning. So there's lots of manufacturing around here. Lots of other types of engineering that spurred from all those other things. So no, you didn't, I didn't have to go into construction to stay in Tampa. But I am pleased with that decision. One major thing, and we get it. I certainly feel it, and this is my answer whenever a young engineer presents to me. Sometimes we get engineers from other industries that left school and went into another industry. We get to see the fruit of our labor all over town. Ah. So many of these other industries, you crunch numbers on one part of one thing that may never get built. And then what happened? You spend a year of your life or two years of your life and what do you have to show for it? Nothing.

But you can drive through Tampa and say, oh, I did that one. I did that one. I did that one. I did it.

Yeah, it's huge reward after a while in your career. And I think you can appreciate this just as an adult in any career after a while, certainly for engineering, I would say what you're designing becomes less significant and the lifestyle that affords you becomes more significant, right? Obviously afford is in there. There's money certainly, but just the lifestyle you lead and where you're going to live and your work schedule and Certainly that seeing your work product, it is hugely rewarding. We're, we do mostly private sector work. We do some public sector work too when a friend brings us in, but mostly we're in the private sector. We're working for real estate companies. We're working for real estate management companies. We're working for developers. We're working for people that are using their space to generate money in their own business. Restaurants, lots of hospitality. It's huge rewards designing a beautiful restaurant and then going there with your friends and family.

That's cool.

They get tired of looking at your chin because you're looking up at the top, but it's hugely rewarding. I love going to, we go to ballparks, we go to, we've been fortunate enough to do a lot of work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New York Yankees over the years. The New York Yankees, they have a massive presence here in Tampa with their spring training facility. You go to ballgames and we go see the Lightning play and read all the banners of all the different companies that are advertising. We did that one. We did that one. We did that one. It's hugely rewarding. It's hugely rewarding.

Wow. So what is it that you think's unique about you, Joe, that has made all of this so successful?

Um, first of all, I, I, I, I'm going to give credit where credit's due. I had a wonderful partnership with Mr. Todd Wilson. We still are, are very close. He still— he doesn't own any of the business anymore, but he still is on staff part-time. He comes in once a week. He's a, a wealth of knowledge. I call him— he's, he's a, he's mechanical, so he designs HVAC systems primarily. I call him the mechanical whisperer. He's just a brilliant engineer. I've never seen him be wrong. He just gets these systems. He and I had a great dynamic when we started. Every, all his customers loved him. They all were willing to give him opportunities, which got me in the door, which got me opportunities. And then we earned their trust. I think most basically something that my, my father-in-law told me, who is now towards the end of his medical profession. He's a primary care physician. He said when we started, he said, if you do what you say you're gonna do when you say you're gonna do it, you'll already be ahead of 90% of your competition. That, that's a very basic thing, right? But it's very true. And, and even just in passing, oh yeah, no problem, I'll get that to you tomorrow. Get it to them tomorrow. You know, if you say I'll get it to you tomorrow and they gotta follow up with you in 3 or 5 days and chase you around for 2 weeks, I think it's, I think it's a little heavy to use the word liar, but you lied to him. You never really intended to get it to him tomorrow.

Or it wasn't consequential enough for you to make a true commitment.

That's right. That's right. So I think that is very instrumental. I think our customers were consultants. When you did insurance, you did construction litigation, we're the design consultants, right? When I started in this industry, when I was a senior in college, I'm looking for engineering jobs and MEP consulting, mechanical electrical plumbing consulting. I'm like, what's the consulting? I never really understood the consulting. I understand the consulting now.

Right.

We're, we really are, we're giving people opinions like your attorney or your accountant would.

Right.

There's more than one way to do everything, and you're really trying to give people what they want. You're trying to give people choices and get them to the finish line of what they're trying to achieve. So I think that's another reason for our success is the flexibility. You'll hear it from a lot of customers. Number one, that their engineers are not responsive. Number two, that their engineers are very rigid.

Yeah.

This is how it is.

It's been a big knock against the profession for a long time.

Absolutely. Now, over the years, I certainly understand why people get to that point if they didn't start at that point, because you've been burned on this or that, and so you just don't become more and more, hey, this is how it's going to be or I'm not going to be associated with it. I certainly understand how people can get to that. But really, at the end of the day, you got to know your audience. I— it resounded with me when I'm hearing you talk about listening and communicating. You got to know who you're working for. You got to know your audience. You got to know what they're trying to accomplish. Developer A is different than Developer B. What are they trying to accomplish? Are they going to build this thing and sell it as soon as it's complete with construction? Or are they going to hold it for 30 years?

Right.

That's quite a difference in a design approach. And unless you ask, you don't know. And if you're taking the approach of, hey, I'm going to design the nicest stuff, that's the most energy efficient, that's going to be the most cost effective over a long period of time, even though it's more expensive upfront, you're losing developer A who wants cheap and he's going to flip it in a year.

Right.

And really, I guess you don't have to be. You want to build a business, you're going to work for all types. So if you're trying to build a business, you're going to work for all those different types of developers and you have to be able to, you have to be able to satisfy all the different types.

So that, that gets me, you just led into my next question. How did you learn how to listen?

Oh, that's, let me see, how old are we? How to listen.

We started learning, we learned vocabulary at about 18 months. We learned to speak at 18 months, but we're, as children, we're never taught how to listen. We're ordered to listen.

Yeah.

We're always told what to listen for and in school we're ordered to listen.

Yeah.

When we're working for somebody else, you mentioned this earlier, we're ordered to listen, but we're really never taught how to listen. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

But to be effective as a business person, CEO, and as an engineer, you have to have had to learn how to listen at some point in time. And it was probably through a process of osmosis, watching other people, learning, making mistakes, and figuring it out.

I— osmosis and certainly mistakes.

Absolutely. That's it.

You, when you, and I like the osmosis word. I'll never forget relatively early in our business, I think maybe it was '06 or '07, shortly after we started, but before the recession of '08. I remember sitting in a meeting with, I think we had won, I think we had won the electrical design, but not the mechanical design on a particular project. I think we were doing the electrical and the plumbing. I want to say, I'm not 100% sure., but there was another HVAC engineer doing the HVAC design. What it meant is that Todd and I were sitting in the meeting together. I had switched over to the electrical side of things. He was there for plumbing and we're sitting there together and then we're listening to this other gentleman who was the mechanical engineer. The— so it's a little, it's a little tricky when you say mechanical engineer in our industry, it's mechanical as HVAC, plumbing, and fire sprinkler all fall under mechanical.

Okay.

But, and it's confusing cuz we learn, use these terms interchangeably. But we do separate mechanical, fire sprinkler, and HVAC.

Separate, separate deals.

Right, right. But sometimes when people say mechanical, they're talking specifically HVAC or they're talking all three. In this case, I'm talking specific HVAC. There was the HVAC engineer and he put his finger on the desk and he said, as long as I am the engineer of this project, this is how this system is going to be. There is no negotiating. This is— and it was a rather expensive system that the owner was trying to value engineer and spend less money on. And he like took a stand. And I remember going like this in my chair. And we left that meeting and I said, wow, that was quite something. And guess what happened about an hour later?

The guy was fired.

He was fired. And Todd got a phone call from that customer saying, we want you to take over the HVAC design. Wow.

That was the eye-opening moment.

It was. I, I would say I think I was decent at listening before that, but that certainly was very eye-opening. It's like, you really do, this is not your money you're spending. This is your customer's money. As long as it meets building code and it's going to work and be safe for the general public, that's our responsibility as a professional engineer. It's your money. You spend it how you want to spend it. We consult, we advise.

And we can tell you how to do it value engineered, or we can tell you how to build a Cadillac.

That's right.

And there are always trade-offs, time, money, and performance.

And I think that is one of the reasons for our success over the years, is that we are able to do that. We're not only— we're able to do that, but we're willing to do that. It's both. Some are not able and some are not willing, but we're willing and able. So I think our customers like that a lot. They can call us for all kinds of different things, and we're just— we just want to get them to the finish line of what they're trying to accomplish.

Are you working— I'm just curious, are you working mostly with owners directly, or are you working as a subs to— I guess as a design professional, you'd be working for the owners directly. Although wouldn't they have an architect or somebody who's— and they need the specialist work to be put into the construction drawings?

Yes. I just keep saying yes because all of that, all of the above. I think that's another big reason for our success is we're business-minded engineers. We're engineers that— and this is certainly the type of engineers that we recruit— engineers that can communicate with another person, that can communicate very specifically with a business person. Yeah. Right.

Who doesn't know anything about engineering.

Right. But you still have to be able to be technical because sometimes we're communicating with a very technical person. A lot of, we do a lot of tenant improvement work. We work in a lot of buildings that have big office buildings or retail buildings and they'll have an onsite, it's called a building engineer at that point that manages these big systems. We listen to those people. They say, this is what I want in my building. Please put these notes on your drawings. They know those systems, they know how that building operates. So you got to be able to talk to the very technical side in that regard. And then you got to be able to talk to the leasing agent who— I'm not saying that they're not technical, they're technical on their own in their own regard, but not in the building systems. What they want to know is the bottom line, the dollar and the timeframe so they can sign their deal, right? So they could get their tenant in and you got to be able to talk to both sides. And I think being able to do that has gotten us in the door with a lot of customers and in the door earlier on than many engineers get invited to the table. Many customers want the ability to consult with their engineers earlier in the process. Right. Can't because they're working on a deal with a big potential whatever. And if they invite their engineer, they're worried their engineer's gonna say something and blow up the deal.

There you go. People say that about lawyers all the time too.

Absolutely. Right.

Right.

Oh, no way. You don't want to do that. That'll be crazy expensive, blah, blah, blah. And then the deal blows up and then nobody has a job. Right now, you can't lie to people, you can't mislead people, but there's softer ways to say things, right? Hey, that would— yes, you could possibly go down that road. Uh, it'd be a little bit more challenging, maybe a little more expensive. Maybe we could look at something like this instead. You got to guide them from the beginning. You don't want to go down the wrong road, but you also don't want to blow up a deal.

This has all been really interesting. I could talk to you for hours. We're running out of time, but I just— I know you've got a construction business on the side too. You do subcontracting, so you design and build. So that's got to be— have its own interesting satisfaction and challenges as well. But we are at the end of the time. So one more question. I'll let you go, Joe. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I really try to be, um, and I think, I think this is what— I think this is what keeps people close to me is I try to— people trust me, and that's because I really want I want the best for other people. I want the best for the people in the company. I want the best for the people around me. To me, this is where religion and faith, the bigger things come into play. There's daily life, but literally every single day you have opportunities to make those decisions. Am I gonna be a positive effect on someone else, the person next to me, or a negative? And it doesn't matter. It could be the whole world you're talking, or it's just the person sitting next to you.

My life today is all about service to humanity. And I get life satisfying teaching people how to make peace, teach, teaching people how to never have a fight or argument again in their lives. Watching couples who fought all their lives all of a sudden have peace and their love intensifies. Or watching how a grandparent interacts with a problematic grandchild and learns how to listen to the grandchild. Serving people. That's the meaning of life. That sounds, and you, you're in that place too.

Very much. Very much.

Thank you so much, Joe. It's been great talking to you.

Nice talking with you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes. Go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.