‍How Professional Engineering Inspections Deliver Better Reports, Without Adding Staff

[00:00]

Well, ArcSite meets a it meets a need in my field work for essentially sketching information and fast prototyping it out. You know, I don't need I need, something that looks very good, very professional. My clients want the answer and they want it in a reasonable period of time. They don't want to wait a week on it. They want it tomorrow. So with ArcSite, I can do that.

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[00:32]

All right, Ed. Thank you so much for joining me today. We'll start off nice and easy. Can you just introduce yourself with your name and your title? Yes, I'm Edward Robinson. I'm a principal at Professional Engineering Inspections. A small engineering firm out of Houston that does, inspection consulting work for, light commercial and residential structures. Amazing. Tell me a little bit about how the business got started. Wow, that seems like yesterday, we, my dad started this business, and, actually, you know, my dad ran a, air conditioning and, heating contracting, General. General. Mechanical contracting company. He was kind of an amazing guy. He was a master plumber, had a Class A air conditioning license, you know. A PE, he worked in aerospace, you know, kind of an amazing guy. But he was an entrepreneur. So he was getting calls to do, mechanical inspections for air conditioning and things like that. And, so he started doing those as part of the, mechanical company he was running. And, some life changes occurred. You know, in that time and he, he, was approached by an architectural engineering firm to to do that work within their firm he was one of the first inspection companies in Houston that, it wasn't done before that time, probably in the late 70s, very early 80s.

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[01:57]

He started doing that, became vice president of that company, started doing structural inspections when they didn't have enough engineers to do structural inspections. And he grew with that company. There was a jumping off point. It was amicable. And he started his own company in '81. And, I came along at about '87 as I graduated high school and needed a, needed a education. So he offered to give me a job and help me get through engineering school. And, I've been with the company ever since we worked for about 15 years together. And, you know that I took the company over when he retired. So. Amazing. So tell me about those early days when your, you know, your father started the business and, also when you had joined, what were those early days like in terms of your process going out to customers sites and just getting a job started from start to finish? Yeah, it was very different. We didn't have the technology we have now. We didn't have iPads and, and digital cameras. We did everything on paper. We actually were pretty much on the cutting edge. I think we were. We were using word processors at that time. That probably cost, you know, $10,000 a piece. I was amazed at that. We used, dictation equipment from a company called dictaphone. That was very expensive. We had, we had a pool of typists in the office, and when we had to do pictures, we had have them developed in one of my early jobs was to go through sort the pictures with caption stickers on them and align them with the caption sheet. And then they were in these little plastic sleeves and we put everything in a folder.

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[03:27]

We do all that digitally now. So, you know, I know we're we're talking about ArcSite today. We didn't do a whole lot of drawing back then. We did, we did it by hand. So. And there were no scanners. We didn't have scanners back then. So you issued the drawings. So. Yeah, very, very manual process. And obviously back in the 80s, that is just the like that is is the way business was done or the way things were done. And as technology evolves, businesses go along with it. So tell me about when you all found ArcSite. What was your process like right before you discovered the tool, and then how did you implement it into your process? We found ArcSite through, at the time, the National Academy of Building Inspection Engineers. ArcSite came to give a presentation, and I was so impressed with it, I immediately went out and bought an iPad. I didn't I didn't own one. I bought one on the way home from the presentation and the presentation was in San Antonio. I live in Houston. On the way back, we stopped to pick one up and I downloaded the software and immediately started using it, the the primary purpose for using ArcSite at the time was we do foundation evaluation. And I didn't have a very fast way of recording foundation elevations and presenting them to my clients, and that was our primary use for it. When we first obtained a license and, it was amazing for that. And we have since grown it into, using it for any kind of situation where I want to display photo references or I want to

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[04:58]

I've used it on some job sites where I, wanted to see how walls lined up. So I had to draw the first and second floor just quickly, and it let me fast prototype that out. And, our business has actually grown a bit as ArcSite grows, too. We we keep incorporating it deeper into our business. As you as as you guys grow the capabilities. Amazing. So talk to me about, like, a typical day, like a new job comes in or a request comes in and then, you you're going out to the job site. Like, what do you do as like step one. Our typical day for using ArcSite is we'll we're still using it primarily for foundation evaluation. We want to record, where we want to record a foundation evaluation, elevation layout and what that looks like usually showing up on the job, trying to find out what why I am I here. What's your concerns? You know, we interview the client. Just kind of typical that type of work. Then I scan, I scan the building. ArcSite has a built in feature using LiDAR that allows me to go room by room, and it will, it will define elements in the room and provide me with a floor plan. On a more complex building, we may hand draw it, sometimes the scan feature on, on very architecturally complex buildings. It's not as effective as you know, it takes up too much cleanup. So we use a, Leica handheld laser and we go through and hand draw it. It's a little slower but not profoundly slower Then we go through our inspection,

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[06:30]

usually export that into, OneNote. And I keep hand notes on that drawing. Then we, we go through the inspection, making observations. And, the last thing that I do is go through and take elevations, and I go back to the piece of software, and I put the elevations directly on floor plan that gets exported into our reports when we get back to the office. I can use I can use the, the drawn sketch with the elevations to estimate the flexion criteria for the foundation. So we'll, we'll, we can take cuts across the foundation and figure out if it matches the ASCE you know, guidelines and, and come up with a plan for it. For either Either saying it's okay or what's the remediation plan which we can display on the drawing. And then, you know, we could also use all of that to display that to the client. We push that out into a word doc. Awesome. So tell me about your customers. I was reading on your website that you kind of service, a variety of different, situations across the Houston area, whether that's a new build, someone's buying a house or a new job site. So kind of talk me through that.

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[07:39]

Our customer, typically our people either buying a house, building a house, or homeowners that have concerns. We do commercial customers where they're buying a piece of property and they want to know the general condition. We often get called with specific problems, why is water leaking in the wall, why is water leaking in the foundation. You know why, we're starting to do energy audits. Energy audit, work. You know why? Why is it so expensive to live here? Why do we have mold on the walls and ceilings, those kind of things. And so the people, you know, contact us to have us do an inspection and provide them with a condition statement of the property and, and figure out what's going on and we use, we use our technology to display that to them, whether it's pictures or ArcSite you know, drawings and, and we provide a very narrative format for that. Awesome. Have you noticed any sort of change in your interactions with your customers since you began using ArcSite, whether that's just ease of being able to like, transfer the info over to them, or just being able to show them what they're looking at based on the drawing or any anecdotes similar to that. Well, we've seen a big change in the industry as far as Engineering Foundation evaluations go. You know, we used to do them in the 80s, there were very basic, you know, we it was good enough to go out and make handheld measurements using spirit level and write down your observations and provide an opinion. And that held for a very long time, maybe 20 or 30 years. But the clients are getting more sophisticated. They want more information. We only recently started issuing,

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[09:11]

I'd say recently the last five years started issuing elevations as a standard part of what we do before we did it, if we thought it was necessary. But more and more clients are asking for it. So it it has allowed us the latitude to provide them at a very, at very nearly the same price point, because prior to that we couldn't do it at the same price point. And that's the reason we kind of held back from doing it. If we did it, we were gonna lose money on the project. We did it anyway. Sometimes that was necessary to present the data, but, it wasn't something that we offered just because we were there. And we have the latitude to do that now because we're using that product. What are some of the things that customers have said to you about their experience after you've completed a job? I had a client contact me today and said that, he used the AI to find me, and he had AI set for forget what the setting was? Blunt I think Evidently there's setting. It'll just talk to you bluntly. I haven't seen this setting yet. But, and it said that I was grumpy. What'd it say, I was grumpy. Short tempered and reliable as hell. There you go. You know, it was probably accurate. So, so they generally say that we provide very thorough inspection. They they usually say extremely detailed reports that are very accurate. We commonly get comments that, well, comments from other professionals which especially in the legal category that that, are very affirming, of the axiom of the information we put out, there's not a lot of arguments about it. We argue about the edges, but not the core you know, those kinds of things. That's awesome. I want to shift gears a tiny bit now and just talk about the, like, entrepreneurship story that's kind of within yourself. And also your father who's founded the business. So tell me about, you know, when you first joined the business, what sort of things did you learn about entrepreneurship and running a business from your father? And how has your personal view towards entrepreneurship evolved over the years. I, I've never really sat down and thought about that. When I started working for the company, I was a student at University of Houston, and my early jobs were were fee based. So, we used to use a word processor, and we, we came up with methodologies for assembling reports using that. And my first job was with, along with a classmate of mine was to write that in windows. And so we actually wrote the software the company uses to write our report, so we still use it. I maintained it over 40 years. So,

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[10:42]

with upgrades and rewrites. So, you know, being an entrepreneur to me, I think it's just I don't know that there's anything else you do is sort of organic to me. You know, it's I can't imagine working for somebody else because, if I get an idea or I a have a, have a new product line or a new investigation methodology or something I want to go pursue, I just decide to do it, you know, so I enjoy doing that, you know, trying to figure out how we're going to market it. But but I've never thought about it being any other way. Yeah. It's sort of second nature, you know, given that this is a family business and it's sort of been, you know, passed down to you generation to generation. Well, you know, and working with my father, you know, we, if I had an idea for doing something, he'd just shrug his shoulder and say you know, we've got the money to do it. We'll buy the equipment. We'll see if it works. You know, it's a good idea. Let's try it. And he was always very optimistic about that. You had to make your case, but it didn't have to even be a very good case. And if it was interesting. He would he was going to do it, you know. Yeah. So that's awesome. I know that's the perks of being an a you know, your own organization. Right. You can kind of take bets. You can see if it works out. It's not like a 15 layer approval process just to try out one piece of software or try one new thing. You can just kind of take the bull by the horns and go and do it, which is awesome. My next question sort of, is in relation to how the business is today. How has the business evolved from back in, you know, those early days in the 80s and and what does it look like today in terms of how many customers you have or revenue that you're running today, or the number of employees that you have?

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[12:15]

You know, it hasn't changed a whole lot since that time period when my dad was running it. He had I think he had, for a period. He had a couple engineers working for him. When I came along, he hired, a state license inspector. I was state license until I got my PE. And then, as I came into the company, we hired yet another engineer. And then as people attritioned out, it's just me now, and. And he can't read it the same way. You know, he, I think he hired people as targets of opportunity. I would say that we, we didn't try to grow the business to be big. We had quality assurance problems when we did that, that we neither one of us were very good at tackling. And we liked doing what we do. We like being the inspector in the field. We like figuring things out. We like, you know, writing reports. And we didn't want, neither one of us really liked managing a business or trying to manage personnel. And so we've always been fairly light light on on personnel. We have office personnel now, we do have an office, staff, we do have somebody that answers our phones. We have people that type our reports into our proofing for us. And I now, that structure has changed a little bit in that the people that we used to hire full time, I hire part time now. Now we have people that I will contract to to do specific work for me. Whereas we used to have those in-house. We don't we don't do that the same way anymore, but we do the same thing with them. Some of the people have been with us for 30 years. You know, they just they just quit and went and did something else and and came back and said hey could i still work for you? And it's like, yeah,

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[13:46]

we wish you hadn't quit. But we understand. And so, you know, they're they're working for us now part time. They have the other projects clearly they're contract based. That's kind of how our business has gone is you know, we found because we we became a cloud based business. I can't remember what year we did that, but we used to have an office and staff and people come in and, and, you know, we found that nobody was there at the same time because we're field organization, all the engineers and inspectors we're in the field. We found it was easier once technology came along to to be, cloud-based. And we were probably early adopters of cloud-based. I think when Dropbox came out, we immediately became cloud-based, allowed us to share files very, very quickly. And I've kind of never looked back at that. So. Definitely. What do you love about being in the field? Like you mentioned, it's something that you want to not like give away as like something that you outsource or hire somebody to do. So that clearly means that you enjoy doing it. I like not being in the office. I don't like answering phones. Phones make me nervous. You know, when the phones are ringing, I just do not like the sound of a ringing phone. Fair enough. I don't know why I talk to other people, other engineers in our organization, and they're like, yeah, because I think the engineers perceive that it's going to be a problem. It's never a problem. But it's it's usually an opportunity. But but I think the anxiety of I'm gonna have to deal with that problem. I'd rather be out in the field figuring something out in peace and quiet. You know, I really like interfacing with our clients. I like solving their problems. I like trying to figure out, you know, I like the stressful feel of,

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[15:18]

I have no idea what their problem is. The way they described it. So how do I take the problem apart and figure out how I'm going to pursue that problem. And is this what they really think it is. And you know, where do we go from here and then figure out how I'm going to document that and then record it, what my next steps are going to be. I really enjoy that process. Definitely, there's obviously like almost like there's many hats that you wear as an entrepreneur, but there's really like two key lanes that you're sort of operating in here. There's, you know, the engineering hat of being out in the field and really looking into the technicalities of everything as well as like the entrepreneurship hat in terms of looking after the business, making sure that you're getting new clients, maintaining current and clients, all of that. So how do you manage juggling both of those two pieces to the business, and is there one that you enjoy more than the other?

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[16:05]

How do I manage the juggling the entrepreneur versus being an employee? Essentially I think is what you're asking. So I'm not sure I'm managing well all the time. You know, over time you just figure out, you know, how much time you're going to need to be in the office. And, I rely heavily on my office staff. They're very good people. We keep our office staff, we have a very low turnover. Very high at first, I guess, but you don't work out in the first couple of weeks. You know, you're probably not going to work out, so. But, you know, we tend to retain people for lifetime. Our, we have an office manager that's retiring, more or less. I hope she doesn't see this, but she. She is, working less for us, I guess you'd say. And, you know, we're bringing people in around her, but, you know, she's been with us a very long time. Does very good work. She's probably been with us 25 years, you know? So, even, like I told you, even the subcontractors we use, some of them have been with us that long or longer. Honestly, having a staff that you can rely on, whether they're, you know, full time staff or part time staff or contractors, like you said, it's really just having people around you that you can lean on, right? Because as a business owner, you can't do everything at once. You can't be everywhere at once. So having and finding people that you can trust and really just being able to like, turn that part of your brain off is huge. And the fact that people are working for you for their entire careers really says something about the type of business that you run. So we haven't really been pushing into software as much as we probably should. I have tried. We have a CRM that we don't use heavily.

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[17:36]

It's there, we use it for our our our internet interactions, but, we haven't pressed into it to get it's full potential out of it. And I find that people in my age group have a hard time shifting to that in small companies, you know, I've asked around how the people and managing it. And, it's a challenge. So when you go cloud based, half of our operation's still done on paper and I mean, we write it on paper, we scan it, we put it in the cloud, you know, so we're not doing we're not doing digital stuff. So I'm definitely the innovator in the company for that. I'm definitely the guy that uses all that stuff and then looks back at his office and goes 'yeah you're probably not going to use this are ya.' And I have to figure out how to bridge it, you know, because I'm not because I don't I can't replace the people, they're too good at their job. So, you know, I can figure out how to work around their capabilities. Exactly. I was just going to say, on that note, when you first, started implementing ArcSite into your process, what was the reaction like from your team? Was it easy to get everybody on board and get them to start using it, or was it a bit of learning and educating at first. Integrating ArcSite into our business was very easy. Really, the the back office staff, don't have much interaction with it other than the finished product. So one of the things I like about it is because I'm in the field a lot, you know, we will push out an image and and drop it in a file with, with our notes that the, the office uses. But to do the final processing of our reports, if they find an error in it, they can text me or, you know, or, IM me, and I'm able to pull it up on my tablet

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[19:07]

while I'm working to make changes to it and then push it back into the office. Back it. We're using OneDrive, so push it back into OneDrive. And I'm good to go. Absolutely. And I want to go back to you know, when you first found ArcSite, you mentioned that you saw a presentation and you went and bought an iPad, which is really, really cool. So what did you see initially that like really perked up your interest in how you could apply it to your business. The reason that we picked ArcSite off one presentation, or at least the reason I did, was because of the speed with which you could prototype out a floor plan. You know, it was, it was very quick and very looked to be very accurate. I was just very impressed with that. Initially when you started using ArcSite, did you have any interactions with the team or, or what has your experience in general been working with the ArcSite team? My experience and dealing with ArcSite team has been extremely positive. You know, the fellow that did the presentation for us in San Antonio when I first started using it was I found he was available. I could almost call I think I could call him and talk to him personally almost anytime time I wanted. You guys have grown a bit since then, and that's not possible anymore. But I do find that my emails or my submissions are they're definitely answered within 24 hours and often within eight hours, you know, or less. If it's during business hours usually gets something back more quickly. I think the latest thing you've implemented is AI and, I like personal interaction. The AI is is not as fun

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[20:39]

as dealing with somebody for me, but I just found that that on job sites, it absolutely answers my questions. And I hate to admit that. I know that's always a little bit tricky, right? Because you want to be able to give people information quickly, which is what AI is really good at. But then also there's that personal touch layer, which is always just trade offs, that human interaction versus that like robot, AI interaction. But I, you know, but I've found that it works. I didn't like it when it first came out. But I have it has grown on me. I still like to send an email off and have a discussion with somebody, but I, you know, the discussion atmosphere helps me grow my brain and understanding your product. And sometimes it helps you understand my brain and how to sell me something. So I kind of enjoy that process. Exactly. We love chatting to our customers. I mean, that's part of why we're doing this, right? It's like really just about understanding how folks are, what their particular situation is. Because, you know, you might be an engineering business and there might be engineering business B, and you might have completely different, you know, ways of looking at things. So it's always good to just like, understand that type of thing. On that note, actually, like if you had to give advice to a younger engineering firm coming up that might be interested in using ArcSite, what $0.02 would you have for them? My recommendation for ArcSite would be pull the trigger on it, make it happen. Figure out how it fits into your workflow. Get back with the with the team. If there's something you don't like. I found to be very, interested in listening to me, I think, I think your team and I have something in the pipe right now

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[22:10]

that that they are interested in talking to me more about. That kind of interaction is hard to find in companies. The the product is not overly complicated. It doesn't it's not overly sophisticated, but I don't need overly sophisticated. I don't think most people do. And I think that's one of its big selling points is, is that it meets the, it meets the requirements professionally without going too far with it, which makes it easy and lightweight to use in the field and very effective at what you're trying to do, which is convey information. Exactly. If you find too much of a there's plenty of heavyweight sort of CAD softwares out there that are just very, very complex. And while that might mean that you could do 10x more with it, it means that you just have to learn 10x to be able to start with it. So I think the lower that barrier is to entry, the quicker that you're going to get off the ground and off to the races and using it. Well, ArcSite meets, a, it meets a need and my field work for essentially sketching information and fast prototyping it out. You know, I don't need I need something that looks very good, very professional. It doesn't have to be polished and shiny. My clients want the answer, and they want in a reasonable period of time. They're not they don't want to wait wait a week on it. They want it tomorrow. So with ArcSite, I can do that. Definitely. If I had to ask you what dollar value impact ArcSite has had on your business, what would you say? ArcSite has improved my bottom line of the business by allowing me to offer a better product

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[23:40]

than my competitors, which, and at a faster pace, which allows me to do more foundation inspections during the day. It's just something that makes sense to add to my portfolio. I want to shift gears now a tiny bit and talk about, the Association of Building Inspection and Design Professionals. Tell me about when you join the organization and what does it do? The Association of Building Inspection and Design Professionals is an affinity group of the National Society of Professional Engineers. It's made up of engineers and architects and other building and design professionals who share a common interest in evaluating buildings, designing repairs for buildings. And we are a professional group with a high standard for membership. We are a social group. We share problems, we share education, and we share the joy of the industry. You know, learning and, sharpening ourselves off of each other. It's always been a group where we get together, we learn about new things, we discuss projects together, pitfalls, and we learn from each other and it's a group you join when you know you get stuck in a project, you can't figure out how to answer this simple question that you think you should know. And you pick up the phone, and you call that guy you met at the last meeting that was talking about the same project. And without fail, almost all the guys are very nice. And they'll they'll share with you, you know, what's going on and how they solve that problem. So it's been a great organization

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[25:10]

to be a member of. Amazing. Has there been a project recently that you've phoned for help on and and gotten a great answer that you want to share? Yeah. ABID has helped me, with projects in the past. I had a I had a legal gas line project where, I needed help with some of the layout, and it was a fairly simple question. I looked at the code for it. I was misinterpreting the code, trying to make it much more complicated than it was, and I. I called, called Greg, actually. And, he listened to my problem and and kinda chuckled a little bit, I think. And he's like, I think you're making this more difficult. He just pointed out, you know, that I was like, my frame of reference was just was off about a few feet. And, once he did that, I was able to, I was able to go, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Don't tell anybody else how stupid I am, and he agreed not to do that. So, And that was a project. Actually, I was using ArcSite on because I had to do a as-built drawing and then a design drawing for, you know, how, how the gas layout should be and what the equipment should be and where it should be. And we use that as also to put photo references onto show, actually, you know, where pictures were taken from, pointing to that kind of thing. So yeah, it's it's been a great organization because of that. And, there's a few people I have on speed dial and when I'm lost. And they're big firms typically, they always answer. So it's great to have a network

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[26:42]

like that, especially when you're not, you know, you're a solo operator like yourself, like, you know, you don't have a I mean, you do have a team of people, but like, having someone there as a network to be able to call and tap into is really valuable and probably helps you feel not quite so isolated when you do have these situations come up. I think that's the biggest problem of being a sole proprietor engineering firm. Most of engineers don't really want to admit what they don't know. They're always afraid somebody is going to use that against them. And I'm probably included in that category, but NABIE or ABID is a safe space to be able to share ideas. And I have found and I tell you, it took me a few years to realize that it was a safe space. But when I started asking around, I realized that most people had similar questions, and I even started getting phone calls, you know, about how I handled things. So, you know, we also share business together. I've gotten phone calls from some of the people that do very different work than I do. And, wanted me to handle the project in Texas because they had no assets here. And so, you know, I was able to help put the project together or provide them with assets here that they weren't aware of. So, you know, it extends your reach too. Definitely if you were to, you know, give a piece of advice to somebody who's thinking about joining ABID or maybe is unsure if they would want to like, you know, advertise that they have a question or problem, what would you say to them? My recommendation for somebody who is considering ABID as a membership would be to join us at one of our conferences, and reach out

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[28:13]

to the membership or to the leadership through our website. There's, there's several engineers sit on the board that would be more than willing to call and talk to them about what their questions are and walk them through the, the the process of becoming a member. And, you know, put their concerns to rest. To go back a little bit to your entrepreneurship story, if you have to travel back in time and give yourself advice when you were first starting out, what would you say to yourself? I mean, it'd be a long conversation. I think there'd be some whiskey involved.

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[28:52]

You know, I, I think my advice to myself, if I were just starting out again and I could meet myself would be. Don't be afraid Solid advice. I've got my last couple of questions for you now, the first of which is. What's your favorite thing about being an entrepreneur? My favorite thing about being an entrepreneur is being able to do anything I want, anytime I want, as long as I can afford to do it. I like the freedom to take time off when I want to, to spend too much time on a project if I want to, to, acquire new knowledge, if I think the company will benefit from it going in that direction without having to do too much, you know, too much justification for it. I think I like all of those things. I just like the freedom of doing what I want to do. You know, if it suits me. And my very last question for you is, how do you define success?

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[29:54]

You know, I see the same cliche, I made all my bills, and I have the love of a good woman. I have deep faith in the Lord. I have wonderful children. to try new things.

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