Wallace Design Collective

A Labor of the Heart

February has long been known as the month of love, I assume because it includes Valentine’s Day. So, I am writing a blog about love – a labor of love, specifically.

A labor of love typically connotes doing something complicated and challenging or a task that you would otherwise not do if it weren’t for love. While some might view engineering as a difficult or dreaded task, I believe most engineers do it because they love it.

One might say a labor of love is folding one thousand origami cranes. Japanese legend says that you will be granted one wish if you fold a thousand cranes. My one wish was to ask my now wife to marry me. It was not a task I dreaded, spending hours folding every night. No, I loved folding each and every crane.

And that’s how most engineers feel about engineering. Don’t get me wrong; some days are hard and some don’t go your way, but we do this job because we love it. It’s a labor of love because:

• We love what we do. 
• We love our clients. 
• Our clients love us.

Engineers love what we do! 

Why shouldn’t we? It is a great profession. The rewards are endless, including creative problem-solving, our work’s impact on everyone, and getting to build things.

I’ve often said that a degree in engineering is a creative problem-solving degree. We love solving problems, and we exercise our creativity and ingenuity when presented with unique and challenging issues. Most people hate problems. They can be hard, annoying and frustrating, but engineers thrive on the challenge and the creativity to understand and solve a problem. And maybe that is where we excel: not just solving the problem but understanding the situation to resolve the issue efficiently.

We love that our designs make it into the world and affect how everyone interacts with their environment. I am sure non-engineers don’t think about how they are constantly interacting with engineered products, but I know I do. From buildings to roads, computers to cars, I’m not sure I could go a day without interacting with an engineered product.

Engineers love being hands-on and helping build things. Most engineers love creating things. For most of us, our younger years were marked by taking things apart so we could understand how they worked. These days, my love of building things with my hands has led me to woodworking. But it is truly incredible to see something you designed become a beautiful modern structure that impacts the lives of so many people.

We love our clients!

I have been lucky enough to have worked at Wallace for 13 years, and I am sure we have the best clients. I love clients who value teamwork and collaboration, open-mindedness, an investment in quality and realistic expectations.

Engineers love clients focused on working together to create the best product possible. I love working with my clients because we always work together to create the best possible solution for each owner and their specific needs.

Engineers love clients who have open minds. My clients are always ready to listen and understand the engineering principles that allow us to realize their designs. When I’ve had to tell my clients that we need to change the design due to some engineering limitation, I’ve always felt we developed a new solution that was perfect for the job, sometimes resulting in a more elegant design than the original might have been.

Wallace is known in the industry for producing high-quality outcomes. We don’t produce anything half-baked, and our clients know it. It really underscores that our clients appreciate and invest in quality. I love our clients for recognizing the hard work and effort we put into every calculation and detail.

I also love that our clients have realistic expectations of what it takes to produce a project correctly. When a situation arises where a design must be modified for one reason or another, our clients are ready to collaborate on a new design to suit the unexpected challenge. 

Our clients love us!

Our clients love us for numerous reasons. It would not be a blog if I tried to list them all, so I will focus on the main reasons: we maintain robust client relationships and we believe relationships are the cornerstone to building trust.

Maintaining client relations can be difficult, but it has not been here at Wallace. I believe our focus on our core values of flexibility, quality, responsiveness and creativity has made it easy for our clients to love us. We work hard to remain flexible when dealing with design or project challenges. As previously mentioned, we are known for producing quality projects. Our clients love us because we are responsive. We answer emails quickly and phone calls even faster! We turn around RFIs and submittals much faster than our contract requires to keep projects on schedule. Our creativity might be the value our clients love most. I have always felt that the harder the challenge, the more creative I am, and I am not alone in that here at Wallace.

Our clients love us because they have known us for so long. We encourage our younger employees to build relationships with their industry peers. That’s good not just for our client relationships but for our business’s success, too. As our younger employees develop into leaders in their own right, they will have the relationships they’ve built over time. Relationships built on years of success build trust and collaboration that is priceless.

So this February, follow my example and tell the ones you love, “I love you!”

At Wallace, we strive to set the standard and make lives better. And if you want to feel the love here at Wallace, give us a call. We are always hiring.