In episode 038 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I interview A.J. Whitaker, PE, PLS who is building a civil engineering firm in a very unconventional way with remote staff. Here are some of the questions I ask A.J. : Expand on the operation side of your business and what made you go into the direction you did with your civil engineering firm? Do you have other staff or hire freelance civil engineers for your business needs? How does the operation side of your engineering business look like with your teams? How do you ensure uniformity in your engineering design work across the team without having an office? How has your client's response been to not having your own engineering office? What is your long term goal for your company? Is it possible to have a partnership structure in place in a remote civil engineering firm? Tell me more about what the SITEOPS technology is that you use for business development? Are there any specific rituals that you practice every day? Quotes to think about:   Here are some key points discussed in this episode: Once you are set in the ways of steady employment, high salary, and dependable benefits, it is a scary thing to walk out on your own and face the uncertainty of starting your own engineering business. I noticed that a lot of engineering companies are making the same mistakes and I started questioning why things get done a certain way and if there are better ways of doing things. It is not always necessary for civil engineers to rent office space, as a lot of the administration work and communication part of the job can be done remotely. This immediately makes you save on your overheads costs. This also makes it possible to hire experts all over the world, and not just in your local area. I use a variety of full time as well as contract employees. I can go out and hire the best and brightest at what they do and put together individual project teams to best suit my clients needs. If you are somebody that is good at just looking busy in a traditional engineering office environment, but don’t turn out a lot of work, you can survive for a couple of years before people start realizing that you are not contributing to the value of their engineering team. In our type of environment it doesn’t matter how busy you look, but what matters is the end result, what you produce and the quality of your work. The communication tools we use include Skype, joinme, email, phone calls, cloud based files. We occasionally, but minimally, meet in person as well. We also make use of checklists and systems that serve as a guide for people in order to help our production team be more efficient and minimize the amount of back and forth that we have to do. The key to making all of this work is to be able to network with people who have the skills that are complimentary to my own skills. By networking with other people that do have these skills, you can see how teams get formed and how a bond is created between workers. SITEOPS technology is a cloud based optimization technology that allows people to go in and do very fast conceptual site layouts and grading designs. AJ’s company currently has an open position at their firm for a project manager. If you are interested you can contact him via his website or LinkedIn. More details in this episode… About A.J. Whitaker, PE, PLS:  As the President of Atlas Civil Design, A.J. provides a full suite of civil engineering services to meet the needs of a diverse clientele. He is a registered Civil Engineer and Land Surveyor with over 20 years of experience in large scale single and multi-family residential, commercial, industrial, municipal, medical/healthcare,