As a full-service engineering firm with 11 engineers licensed in seven states, FOCUS Engineering and Surveying has a passion for delivering the highest standards. Our team of trained and experienced professionals extends to another 14 certified industry professionals. With our commitment to quality service, we put great value on making sure our employees are trained in all aspects of work in the A/E/C industry. Additionally, our dedication extends well beyond technical training, as we highly value and consistently invest in corporate culture training.

Keeping Clients Happy

Since the company’s inception over 13 years ago, we’ve concentrated on creating a value-based culture. Our corporate mission is to keep clients happy. To be successful, this involves much more than delivering technically accurate work. Each of our team members must be skilled in project ownership, team communication, and client relationship building. Early on, our leadership team identified the need to better assist new employees in understanding and executing our core values. It took many years to create our work environment, and we realized new employees are not going to pick up the expectations and nuances by osmosis. We needed to take active steps to help them.

FOCUS School of Beginnings

This realization led to the inception of the FOCUS School of Beginnings, a six-month, once-a-week internal education program for new employees. As Founder and General Manager of the firm, I lead participants through 17 weekly inter-departmental group sessions, with the remaining nine department meetings led by our department managers. The core of these training sessions is to ensure that our employees understand the firm’s commitment to excellence. We teach employees skills to assist in keeping our clients happy and building lasting client relationships.

With our training sessions, we’ve created a high degree of consistency among our employees and departments. When working with clients, employees have a clear understanding of our expectations for how we should best deliver on FOCUS’s mission and core values. This consistency has resulted in long term client relationships where we can continually deliver on our projects.

Employee Development

In addition to the FOCUS School of Beginnings, there are other employee development programs. One of the more popular is Company Book Reads. During the six-month education sessions, employees are introduced to some of the company’s core books, including Good to Great, Great by Choice, and Extreme Ownership.

Not only do we read business books as a company, but we also incorporate other books about people striving to be their best. Our Structural Engineering Manager, Adam Eastman, shares that one of his personal favorites is Boys in the Boat, a true story about the struggle of a 1936 American Olympic rowing team competing for a gold medal in Berlin. “In our book review sessions, employees actively discuss the lessons learned and how we can apply these to our daily work and ultimately to our mission,” explains Adam. “As a company, we have high standards, and we hold each other accountable.” Managing a team of 14 employees, Adam appreciates the corporate culture of clear communication and high standards.

Our core books, coupled with our internal training programs, help us to increase efficiency and learn to speak a common language. When a team member recommends another to “eat the frog,” we know this means to tackle the biggest problem first and to do so quickly—after which we can worry about the smaller issues. With our core values aligned and a unified understanding of our work, we’re united as an entire company.

Crew Chief Pathway

We commit to excellence within individual teams as well. Trenton Smith, the Construction Staking Department Manager, describes the development of the company’s Crew Chief Pathway. “We’ve established a professional development program enabling junior and mid-level team members to receive in-depth training to become a Crew Chief,” says Trenton. “We have discovered that our Pathway Program results in more highly trained professionals, both technically and from a client-interfacing perspective.”

The firm’s concentration on supporting excellence extends to its overall business operations. “I appreciate how our company culture challenges each employee to become a better version of ourselves,” states Human Resources Manager, Stacy Malone.

The licenses, certifications, and designations earned by FOCUS Engineering and Surveying staff both display and contribute to a culture of ongoing betterment. Likewise, our corporate culture training programs have created systems and processes to help us grow from six employees to over 70, adding more departments, engineering services, and to the quality we deliver

In all aspects, we prioritize making sure our employees are qualified, knowledgeable, experienced and confident with every job and project they take on. It’s good for business and it is great for our people.