AECOM

I started with Washington Group, which was acquired by URS, which eventually became AECOM.

Like CDI, we grew Washington Group’s Houston office like crazy…from about 80 people to over 600 in just over 2.5 years. “If you build it they will come” was the mantra given to HR, so a large part of my activities in those days was focused on recruitment branding. We relocated the Process & Industrial Group’ s leadership to Houston, and the senior vice president responsible for M&A activities basically adopted me to support our strategic acquisitions efforts.

That is, until the day we got acquired by URS, in which case my role became more “merger” centric, helping with integration activities (in addition to running all marketing, advertising, internal communications and public relations efforts).

My team eventually grew to eleven people across three offices, and we won various internal awards, implemented significant process improvements across the company, and consistently had a fantastic win rate while maintaining our B&P budgets. The company went from 25,000 to 40,000 to over 55,000 (once we acquired Flint), and I eventually left URS.

I’ve always said, “I’d like to think the impact I’ve made on companies and the way I’ve left them would allow for me to return some day.” That happened. After AECOM purchased URS (at the time a company of over 110,000 people), they asked me to reclaim my old role and help them rebuild in oil and gas.

Unfortunately, corporate leadership was well on its way to alter its risk profile and divest itself of its oil and gas group, so my return tenure was short-lived, and I got to prove again that companies would hire me back. I left Burns & McDonnell only to be hire directly back in under a year.