The utilities we cared about most were the ones getting the least attention.

I've spent my career in power delivery, most of it inside substations and most of that in protection and control. Long enough to have set electromechanical relays, and long enough to have replaced a great many of them. The equipment has changed completely. The thing that determines whether a project goes well has not: somebody has to understand what is actually in the yard before anyone decides what ought to be.

Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to ignore a pattern. The engineering industry is organised around large clients, and that isn't malice — it's arithmetic. A firm with hundreds of engineers needs projects big enough to keep them busy. So the smaller job gets quoted high, scheduled late, or staffed with whoever happens to be free. The senior engineer who sat in the kickoff meeting is rarely the one who opens the drawing file.

The utilities on the wrong end of that arrangement are the co-ops, the municipals and the public utility districts keeping power on across small-town and rural America. They don't have an engineering quality problem. They have an access problem. Their operators frequently know those systems better than anyone a consultant could send. What they don't have is a firm that will take a four-relay job seriously, or pick up the phone about it two years later.

So we built the firm we would have wanted to hire. That meant a few decisions we've held to even when they cost us work.

• We stayed small, and senior.

  Five engineers and no junior bench. It caps how much work we can take on, and it means the engineer who scopes your project is the one who delivers it. There is nobody to hand it to.

• We do substations only.

  Not civil, not line design, not distribution planning. There is more money in being a full-service firm. There is more value to you in hiring the one that has already seen your exact problem.

• We stay independent of the equipment.

  We sell engineering hours and nothing else. What goes into your specification is what we believe belongs there.

What I want, a year after we've finished, is for someone on your team to open our drawings, find that they match what's in the panel, and not need to call us to understand them. That is the whole standard. Everything else on this site follows from it.

If you have something in play, tell us about it. We'll give you a straight answer on whether we're the right fit.

The combined experience behind this →