The Drawings Were on the Floor

The first client meeting our founder, Tom Wallace, ever took was conducted with the drawings spread across the floor. There were no tables yet.

That detail has lived on in Wallace company lore long enough that it’s easy to treat it like a charming origin story. But sit with it for a second. A client walked into a 500-square-foot office in downtown Tulsa, looked at an engineer kneeling on the floor over his own drawings, and decided to trust him with a building.

That only happens one way. The client wasn’t evaluating the size of the office, the pedigree behind the name or the appearance of success. He was trusting Tom’s ability to understand his problem and solve it thoughtfully.

Forty-five years later, that thread still runs through Wallace.

Tom founded Wallace Engineering in 1981 with an unusually ambitious vision for a small structural engineering startup at the time. He wanted cutting-edge technology on every engineer’s desk long before that became standard practice. He wanted high-quality documents. He wanted responsiveness. He wanted to build a company clients trusted because the work consistently made their lives better.

That philosophy shaped the firm early.

In the mid-1980s, Walmart was expanding at a pace most firms struggled to keep up with. Their architectural partner needed structural engineering support across a rapidly growing national program, where the real challenge wasn’t just the engineering itself – it was speed and scalability.

Wallace responded by building systems, not just drawings. CAD prototypes, custom production workflows and internal software helped the firm operate at the pace the client required.

That instinct, to look beyond the assignment itself and understand what clients actually need to succeed, quietly shaped the decades that followed.

Over time, clients began asking Wallace to solve a broader range of problems. Not because those needs suddenly appeared, but because trust had already been established. Relationships that began in structural engineering expanded into civil engineering, roof consulting, special inspections, surveying, landscape architecture and additional markets across the country.

The offices evolved the same way.

Kansas City. Oklahoma City. Denver. Atlanta. Nashville. Chouteau. Rogers.

None of them exist because growth itself was the goal. They exist because relationships deepened, clients needed support closer to where the work was happening and Wallace believed responsiveness mattered enough to show up there.

By 2021, the name Wallace Engineering no longer fully reflected the scope of the work or the collaborative nature of the firm itself. Wallace Design Collective wasn’t a reinvention so much as an acknowledgment of what the company had already become.

There’s a version of the story that focuses on numbers. Offices. Project counts. Revenue growth. Industry rankings.

Those things matter. But they don’t explain why clients who first worked with Wallace decades ago still work with Wallace today.

The explanation is quieter than that.

For 45 years, Wallace has grown the same way it began: by listening carefully, solving problems thoughtfully and earning trust one relationship at a time.

To the clients, industry partners and colleagues who have been part of that story – thank you. You are, in every sense, the reason why this story is still being written.