Ep 260 - Beyond Technical Excellence: Building a Stronger Engineering Consultancy! with Moein Varaei
Welcome to Episode 260 of Playing With Perspective - The Suspended Animation Podcast! 🎙️ Moein Varaei is back! And this time we’re talking about a question plenty of engineering consultancy owners will recognise. How can the team be flat out, the client be happy and the project still make a loss? Moein is a Chartered Civil Engineer with more than 38 years of experience in engineering consulting, project management and senior leadership, including senior roles with international consultancies. Today, as Principal Consultant at Global Empowering Solutions, he helps engineering firms improve project performance, develop their people and build stronger businesses. We catch up on what Moein’s been doing since his last visit, then get into the realities of running a growing engineering consultancy in Australia. A technically excellent project can still leave you wondering where the margin went. Sometimes it starts with a client asking for “one little change”. The team gets on with the work, the extra hours stack up and the conversation about fees happens long after anyone can remember what “little” meant. 😅 Here’s what we get into 👇 - Busy teams and thin margins. Why strong demand for engineering services can coexist with commercial pressure, and what separates a healthy consultancy from one that simply looks busy. - Scope creep and variations. Where the handover between agreeing to a change, doing the work and charging for it can break down. - Turning engineers into project managers. What support a brilliant technical specialist might need when they suddenly own the budget, the client relationship and a team of people. - Growing beyond the founder. How owners and managers become the people everyone waits on for decisions, and what it takes to give the team more room to make those calls. - Where Moein would start. We put him in the shoes of an adviser walking into a 30–50-person engineering consultancy whose MD wants a stronger, more profitable business. What would he look at first? - We also talk about how Moein works with consultancies through Global Empowering Solutions. If you run a firm, lead a project team or have just inherited your first project budget alongside the technical work, there’s plenty here to chew on. I’m particularly interested in that moment when a small firm realises the informal habits that got it this far are starting to hold people up. 🎧 Listen to Episode 260 and subscribe to Playing With Perspective wherever you get your podcasts. Share it with a colleague who’s ever heard “while you’re in there, could you just…” and knew exactly where it was heading. Get in touch with Moein! https://globalempoweringsolutions.com.au/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/moein-varaei/
