Boiling Point - Episode 046 - Tim Ryan
Fundy Engineering
Introducing Tim Ryan
There are times in business when the demand for your work slows down or even grinds to a halt. These situations can sometimes be completely out of your control, like when your region begins an economic slump. However, just because there may be a lack of business in your own neck-of-the-woods, it doesn’t mean you necessarily will have to make the hard decisions in relation to your workforce.
Tim Ryan faced a very similar issue with Fundy Engineering when a number of their projects finished around the same time. Tim is the principle at Fundy, and has worked with them for over 19 years. During his time with the business, he saw the workforce build from five employees to 50 as a result of work primarily in the Atlantic Provinces. As a number of significant projects came to a close, Fundy Engineering was seeing a drop in demand for their services and something had to be done to keep the company and it’s employees working.
So, Tim had a mission to find companies to partner with out west that would allow Fundy to provide services for them and for knowledge to transfer to his own people. In the west, there had be an issue of employee loyalty and retention as the Alberta oil sands offered many high-paying jobs and workers had a choice of who they wanted to work with or who would pay the most money. As a result, many companies seeking professional services, like the type Fundy was offering, were spending big bucks trying to find employees. Tim took the elevator pitch for his company’s reputation of hard work, loyalty, and quality, and found companies who needed their services and had compatible company cultures.
Tim says that professional service companies need to start thinking more like entrepreneurs and be more innovative to grow their bottom line. How you go about doing this is the thrust of this week’s episode.
In this episode
- Tim explains his motivations for traveling west to bring back work.
- He also tells us how he went about targeting the companies he thought would be a good fit for Fundy Engineering services.
- Tim also tells us how smaller companies working collaboratively can deliver better service than the big guys.
- He also tells us about how this affects smaller companies to make them look bigger than they are.
- Tim also points out that if you don’t present yourself to other companies who need your work, they may not even know you exist.
- He also speaks to the fact that Atlantic Canadian businesses in general have to become experts on a vast amount of subject matter and are very useful to companies out west who have the luxury of having a more narrow focus.
- Greg tells us his plans to do something very similar with 30 different film production companies.
- Greg is also reminded that there is always someone else out there in the world that is doing something similar, if not exactly, what you do and they could be fantastic partners with excellent alignment for mutual benefit.
- Dave appreciates Tim’s mission and the importance of aligning with companies that share a similar vision and values in order to do great business together.
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