Naseem Bashir’s downtown office overlooks a part of Edmonton that, as he describes it, holds nearly unprecedented potential for this city. Right now it’s mostly a parking lot, sandwiched by the Epcor Tower and Grant MacEwan University, but one day it might be a new, world-class arena.

For an engineering firm like Williams Engineering Canada Inc., which Bashir (Electrical Engineering Technology ’88) has led since 2008, landing even part of such a project would be a boon to this mid-sized, Edmonton-based company. But the true benefit lies beyond that – and seeing it requires refined vision.

Basically, it all comes down to talent, says Bashir, and not just the hockey-playing variety. A new arena would mean more people downtown, which would mean more restaurants and nightlife, which would attract even more people – young, creative, ambitious people – to set down roots here and apply their talents to building businesses like Williams Engineering.

No doubt, that kind of big-picture, positive thinking played a role in earning Bashir a nomination as a 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Prairie finalist. Here, he shares thoughts on what it takes to run a successful, growing firm, regardless of whether a particular parking lot ultimately bears fruit.

The war for talent

That’s the Number 1 problem in running a business. It always will be. The war for talent is happening anywhere that the baby boomers are playing a significant role in the North American economy. A lot of them can retire. Where are we going to get the people to do all the work we need to do?

Edmonton has lots of things going for it. We have the opera, hockey, baseball in the summer. We’ve got a great river valley system, some great neighbourhoods and a reasonable cost of living. But it’s cold. It’s not as exciting as, say, living in Seattle. We have to be more than just a stopping point for people along the way. There aren’t enough bodies in Alberta to build all the things we want to build.

The importance of brand

Our brand is not just about our logos; it’s how our community sees us. Our business is very relationship based. It has a lot to do with our connection to the community, and our ability to be able to find ways to participate in it. So our brand is what the community says it is. You can’t control that. We try to tell them what it is, and do things to demonstrate it, and hopefully what comes back echoes that.

An enormous amount of effort has gone into the brand. In fact, it consumes the time and energy of our executive team every single day. We’re out there in our offices getting our people to understand it. Essentially, it’s about showing and demonstrating and accountability, doing what you said you were going to do.

If you don’t, you undermine your own leadership in the community and that creates a lack of trust, and that lack of trust erodes the brand.

The need for sustainability

We measure our carbon footprint in tons per person – and we know that’s necessary to attract talented staff and be well respected in the community. We’re trying for 6.3 tonnes per person this year.

We do waste audits, water audits. When we negotiate any new real estate we let Realtors and landlords know they need to line up with our needs. We offset travel through technology. Our sustainability lead tells us that we aren’t to fly to Calgary any more. Take the bus, if possible. She also plays a role in making our engineering projects more sustainable.

It has taken us three years to take the culture of the organization and do what I call a quarter-turn to the right. At first I thought this would be easier, that I could do it overnight.

Learning to be a leader

I was always the guy who took the brute-force solution to things. I would work at it the hard way – and it always seemed to work for me. But I was also the guy who was willing to take more on. After my education, I moved to Yellowknife. It was a great enhancer for a career. You got to do everything. There was no one else to do it.

Over time you end up having people working for you and you develop your own management skills. That evolves into a leadership role. Management and leadership are very different. Managing is directing of activities and leading is the bigger picture of pushing the organization outwards. Managing is more hands on.

My style evolved around accountability. I just felt that was the right way to do things. I’m also a typical engineer. I like to measure the crap out of things.

In the last three or four years I’ve had to learn to change my leadership style several times. You have to be able to adapt. During my first few days as president and CEO, it was a much more dictatorial style. We didn’t have time to get everybody on board, because we were in the soup and we had to make some fast decisions. We had five leaders of our organization taken out in a period of five months.

The first accident [a plane crash that claimed founder Allen Williams and CFO Steve Sutton] happened in 2007, October. The second [another fatal crash involving president Reagan Williams, business strategist Rhonda Quirke, and CFO Phil Allard] happened in March, 2008. We needed to fill that void. If you’re on a bus and it’s on fire, we’re not going to call a meeting to decide how to escape.

I think that people understood why we needed to be that way. Over time, I had to learn how to relax that style and be more inclusive and allow the organization to makes some of the choices when times changed.

Weathering tough economic times

We did really well for the first part of the recession then we started to slide a bit. We’ve since had to get the organization to be the right size for this environment, rather than spending the time getting ready for what a year ago looked like the next boom – which, frankly, doesn’t look like the next boom to me.

Alberta’s a great place to be, so it attracts everybody, including firms from around the world, especially the United States. So competition’s up, the market’s flat, and there’s a lot of jittering about the world economy, which means the ability to grow is curtailed.

What that will force us to do is to be very good at what we do with what we’ve got.

The future of Williams Engineering

This company needs to be much bigger. I say that because the people of this organization need to have opportunities to move up over time. At some point, I need to no longer be here. I need to be sailing or golfing or making clay pots and doing yoga, or just something else, and somebody has to come along and take the company where it needs to go next.

But if we don’t create the opportunities for people within the organization, they’ll move on. That’s the Number 1 reason for the growth. How big could it be? Don’t know. In 2005 to 2009 we doubled it. Right now we’re at about 170 people. We’d like to double it again, in terms of revenue and people.

The NAIT effect

Technical experience is something that they really don’t teach you at university. I went though both programs – NAIT and the University of Alberta. In university you talk about a lot of theorems and you do a lot of math but you don’t necessarily get your sleeve caught on the shaft of a motor and know what that feels like. There’s a lot of power there!

But one of the biggest things for me from NAIT, and I still use it today, was about writing. An instructor called it “linguistic democracy,” which was about making sure that you understood who you’re writing for.

He also taught me how to write a resumé. When I was at our Calgary office, if we didn’t have a position for someone with a good skill set, I would help rewrite their resume to better reflect their expertise. And, guess what? They got hired. And I learned that at NAIT.

That speaks to the balance you need to strike. You can't just be an electrical engineering geek; you need to know how to communicate. That is the most important thing technical people need to do. They can solve the world’s greatest problems but if they can’t tell anybody about it, good luck.

As told to techlifemag.ca