Happy to announce that I just received my professional engineering registration (PE) in Ohio and expect my Indiana registration shortly. This will allow us to better serve our clients who work in more than one state. We welcome "chain" clients who work in the Midwest!

Labels: Ohio PE registration engineering

These are not exactly fun times to be a civil engineer in Michigan. Actually, it's pretty tough being a civil engineer anywhere right now! It's not so much an issue of losing customers to competitors but of our customers just not doing many projects right now.

It's easy to find yourself moping and crabbing about this, and I am as guilty as the next person, but none of that will change the near-term outlook. So I have decided to use this time to have some fun testing the waters on new ventures, finding creative ways to cut costs yet more, and checking out new avenues for civil work.

First, I finally went through the tedious but productive task of getting my credentials on file through NCEES (National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, see www.ncees.org). It's one of those things I said I should do, but never had time for before. It was really pretty funny, after twenty-five years in the business, trying to come up with phone numbers and addresses for places I worked more than twenty years ago! The fun of it was that I picked up the phone and found that at certain places, like the City of Huntington, Indiana where I was once City Engineer, there were actually still co-workers there that remembered me. Anyway, once I got through all the paperwork, it is now easy to get licensed in other states. Easy, but not cheap! So I should shortly be good to go in Ohio and Indiana which opens up more doors for me.

I have also had more time to work on my other love, which is family history research (see my website at www.ancestryhelper.com). I am trying, and loving, working freelance for heir tracking firms. Here's something I quickly learned...for heavens sake, make a will! Almost all of the cases I have worked on are estates where single people or childless couples have gone without leaving a will and the courts are left trying to figure out where second cousin Whosit is or what happened to Uncle Alfred after he went to Alaska. It's fun for me trying to answer those questions, but not so fun for the courts!

As to cost-cutting, hey, I was from a family of nine, so that was second nature to me, but still it is tough to do after a certain point. Some of the simple things I have done are: 1) Cut down the number of phone lines; 2) Rexamined where I advertise by looking at where my work really comes from and cutting ads where they don't pay off; 3) Ditched my storage shed and try to keep survey supplies that were stored there on a just-in-time inventory basis right in the office; 4) Renegotiated my existing lease with the landlord ; 5) Recycle everything I possibly can; 6) Sold some extra items on Ebay.

Happy Easter!!

Looking around at the countless file cabinets taking up a lot of expensive office space, it dawned on me that I really don't need to be keeping all that paper.

I don't know about you, but I have a copier/scanner/fax machine that can scan things to pdf (or whatever). Why not just start scanning everything and go paperless, I thought.

So I had my right hand man Scott, a.k.a. my IT King, set up a bunch of e-folders to scan to. I made folders for design files, for bank records, for day to day bills, for invoices and receipts, for timesheets...you get it. If it's in the office, it got an e-folder.

I started, with great glee, scanning new papers that cross my desk. The phone bill? Aha! Scan it and shred it and recycle it! A mortgage survey? Scan all the title work etc and e-file it and then recycle the paper!

OK, so that was the easy part. Then I started looking around at ALL THOSE FILE CABINETS full of old papers. A little at a time, I thought.

Well, then reality set in. It takes a LONG time to scan one drawer full of information. So I moved on to epiphany number two: I don't really need to keep all this stuff in any form!

I think that in the engineering and surveying business, we all have a tendency to think that old records are precious. We really NEEDED that plat copy when we did that boundary survey in 1986 so we must surely keep it! We simply HAVE to keep that approval letter from Plainfield Township for a project that was built in 1994. I knew rationally, that this thinking was flawed. So I sat back and made some decisions.

First, there were files from companies that weren't even mine but that had been purchased at some point in the past. Since I have no responsibility or liabilty for the works of the firms, I realized that I didn't need to keep anything at all except the design and survey drawings.

For a company purchased in 1994 who always left everything loose in their files, I took a deep breath and, in one five minute spree, emptied the entire contents of the files into the recycling wastebaskets in the office. Let me tell you, that felt good!

Then I moved on to the files of a firm purchased in 2005. That got a bit tougher for two reasons. One, was that I thought it might be useful to at least keep the client contact information sheet as well as the drawings. That meant sorting out those pieces before dumping the file. The second thing was that the green conscience in my head was chanting: Reduce, reuse, recycle! For these files, the manila folders were often in good shape. Also, the contents were hole-punched and kept in place with those metal prongs.

So that task is frankly taking forever. My staff and I try to devote a bit of time each day to culling out the contents worth scanning, setting aside decent folders to be reused, and pulling out the metal prongs to be reused or recycled. Why would I need to reuse any folders if I am going paperless? Well, I still plan to keep paper files for jobs curently in progress as it is simply easier to look at materials that way. After the job is completed, it will be scanned. It will be awhile before this part of going paperless is achieved.

Then there were the old survey notes from a survey company that closed its doors in the early 1980s. For those of you who are surveyors, I know you will shudder at what I am about to say. Survey notes are sacred cows. It took me a full month of making this move to paperless before I could admit to myself that what were primarily mortgage survey notes from 30 years ago are really not valuable to anyone. So, working as fast as I could, so I wouldn't think about it too hard, I threw into the recycling baskets 31 index file drawers full of survey notes. I have to admit, I felt oddly guilty doing that, but you know what? I really didn't need them! Now I am trying to decide whether to try to get a few bucks for those old odd-sized file drawers on craigslist or to just take them to the scrap metal dealer and be done with it. I also have to admit that I still have several drawers of survey notes of more recent work that I can't bring myself to pitch and probably won't ever.

Then there are the original survey drawings from that same old company. Again, they are mostly mortgage surveys. I have started scanning those and was thinking of pitching the originals. Who wants a 35 year old mortgage survey? But then I had a brainstorm. Maybe residents WOULD get a kick out of having an old copy of a mortgage survey of their house. So, for now, I am setting those originals aside and indexing them. I will probably wake up one day, decide this is lunatic, and pitch them post-scanning, but right now, the history lover in me can't bear to throw those.

Finally, there are the office papers. You know, insurance bills, bank statements, stuff on other people's firms just in case you might need to subcontract, copies of proposals you wrote for jobs you didn't get....

You get the idea. A lot of this is stuff you have to scan because you may need it for the tax guy someday. Ask your accountant about how far back you need to keep and pitch the rest. Again, it dawned on me that I have no tax responsibility for the previous firm I bought, so why would I need to keep, let alone scan, the telephone bills of that firm for the past millenium!
Lots of other files in those drawers could just be emptied and the folders recycled because I never really needed to make a file in the first place.

So that's my story. It is a lot of work, but strangely liberating, to let go of paper. Sure, reforming the paper-keeping habits of a business lifetime is time consuming, but now I can literally rent a smaller space, and use the systems I have created to never accumulate mountains of paper again.

Do it! You won't be sorry.

Someone asked me how the work load is in Michigan right now. Here's my thoughts.

Anyone working in Michigan knows what a challenge the economy is right now. We find the residential market very soft (almost non-existent!) but the commercial market still offering some thriving segments. For example, in the past few months, we have done surveying and civil engineering site planning on several Meijer gas stations and Family Dollar stores and are presently working on a blood center project in metro Detroit.

Commercial realtors continue to order surveys for their clients who are buying, selling and refinancing commercial, industrial, and office properties. Out of state real estate investors seem to see Michigan as a good place to buy right now because of somehow soft land prices here.

Here's hoping that the economy continues to recharge by strengthening its technical and medical business segments!

Labels: michigan survey civil engineering commeriial

Wherever possible, we incorporate green elements into our designs. This might mean using bioswales, permeable pavement, plant materials that are low maintenance, etc. Clients can still be leery of these "new" techniques (many of which are really old!) so we aren't always successful in getting everything incorporated that we would like to see.

We're on a mission here to try to make the office more "green." To us, that means making it a healthier, happier place to work and a concentration on consuming less.

We'd love any ideas you have on how to make this happen and will share what we're trying and let you know how it works.

Our first step is going to be to add a lot more plants to the office to help improve air quality . We rent in one of those totally closed-in offices with no way to get air circulation. We're also trying something I read which is to place containers with charcoal throughout the office. We're picking fun, decorative containers for this with emplyees choosing what they want at their work station. Charcoal acts like an ionizer to improve air quality.

Labels: going green

I read something very interesting in the last issue of a great magazine called Fast Company (http://www.FastCompany.com). The article was called something like "Feeding the Beast" and the point of the article was that the only way to really cut energy use is to quit consuming so darn much. As an example, they mentioned fast food places touting that they had switched from stryofoam boxes to recycled cardboard boxes. While an improvement in some respects, the real key is that we all consume gas to get to fast food places and cause energy to be used to recycle those boxes etc.

We are a consumer driven economy here in the US but we can all make a conscious effort to try to consume less. As an example, here at the Gosselin Group office, we are putting together a formal strategy to minimize paper use by utilizing e-fax, deciding if a paper really needs to be printed (or simply read and kept in an electronic folder), etc. Go green!

This is Deb Gosselin and not only am I the President of The Gosselin Group, Inc. but I am also a 50-something blog virgin! So please excuse me if the format is boring while I get the hang of this!

Since this is an opening post, just a few quick words about my background. I started out in psychology (have a Bachelor's in Psychology and a Master's in Counseling from Michigan State), worked for five years as a counselor and prof in a community college and then got bitten by the civil engineering bug. I went back to school at Tri-State University in Angola, Indiana (fabulous place to get civil engineering training) and got a Bachelor's in Civil Engineering. Then it was off to a job as a City Engineer for a couple years (baptism by fire!) followed by 18 years in a private consulting firm. Last year I took the dive and went off on my own and thus...The Gosselin Group, Inc.

I plan to use this blog to talk about interesting jobs going on here, about new things going on in the world of civil engineering and surveying, and about "green community" and other green design (one of our favorite topics here).