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BUSINESS NEWS WESTWOOD ANNOUNCES NEW CHARITABLE FOUNDATION, WESTWOOD GIVES Westwood Professional Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the creation of the Westwood GIVES, a 501c3 charitable foundation. Westwood GIVES represents the heart of Westwood’s employees and serves as a platform for extending additional resources to causes and needs most important to the team. The mission of Westwood GIVES is to enrich, engage, and impact the world through three pillars of giving: ❚ ❚ Health and Wellbeing (Enrich). Enrich the lives of children, veterans, and the elderly through financial support for effective therapies and cures for chronic illness and disease, as well as sustenance, clothing, and shelter for those in need. ❚ ❚ Professional Industry Support (Engage). Engage students and fund scholarships for a variety of relevant professional and technical fields. Support high school
level STEM programming with the goal of exposing students to Westwood’s variety of professions and potential career paths that could enhance their future. ❚ ❚ Building and Infrastructure (Impact). Positively impact disadvantaged communities and families by providing
Westwood is a leading multi-disciplined AEC industry professional services provider for national wind energy, solar energy, power delivery, private development, and public infrastructure projects. Westwood was established in 1972 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through a focus on its people, culture, and clients, Westwood has quickly expanded to serve clients across the nation from multiple U.S. offices. View more Westwood facts. In 2021, Westwood placed No. 4 and No. 21 respectively on Zweig Group’s national Hot Firms’ and Best Firms To Work For Lists, and received two 2nd place awards for Zweig Group’s Marketing Excellence. Westwood also ranked consistently higher four years in a row on the Engineering News Record list as a leading design firm in the country. The firm consistently ranks on industry top 25 lists and receives recognition for its involvement on award-winning projects nationwide.
financial support for organizations that build homes, schools, and the infrastructure to support safe and sustainable living.
Paul Greenhagen, Westwood’s CEO/ President, and Westwood GIVES’ Chairman of the Board sees this as the firm’s logical next phase of giving, “As Westwood has grown, we’ve empowered our people to take a proactive role in giving back at the local level. This has resulted in even more inspiring stories of our team’s ability to touch and improve lives throughout the country, and internationally. And yet, as a team, we continually desire to do more. Westwood GIVES will help us achieve that.”
JOSEPH LOSARIA, from page 9
often turned out to be even better projects. Heck, maybe you should partner with the firm that beat you to actually enhance your next pursuit! Leadership is also important in starting a new AEC business line. Your decisions and approach as a leader either work or they don’t. The one key leadership approach that has helped me in starting a structures group is a simple one: Empathy. Leaders need to inspire, and you cannot inspire others without empathy. Look to your staff, ask them questions, and, above all, listen! You’d be surprised at the ideas that your own staff generate. When you think you know the solution, ask others, and get feedback. Not only could you find a better approach, but the morale boost to your group brought about by empathy is invaluable. The last lesson in starting a new AEC business line is humility. We never let the success we did eventually have, outgrow the vision that got us there. There is always a better way to do things and there will always be someone better than you. Never let success overshadow your humble beginnings. PGA will continue to grow, but early on, we realized the importance of culture and how humility has made us successful. It will be a challenge as companies grow to keep that culture, but I think humility within company leadership is key. Never forget, the asset of an AEC firm lies within the people that make that firm. So here we are seven years later, continuing to take risks, but never forgetting to believe in ourselves and keeping that vision that has brought us here today. So, if you’re faced with the same scenario in your career at some point, take the risk, believe in yourself, love what you do, and you’ll do just fine. JOSEPH LOSARIA is structures group manager and a principal/VP at Patel, Greene, and Associates, LLC. Contact him at joseph.losaria@ patelgreene.com.
your network of contacts, but even though hiring talent with the right skills is important, they need to have a similar vision for the task at hand. Our vision was to engineer solutions based on integrity, commitment, and excellence, while maintaining a cohesive internal culture. Believing in yourself is equally important. Within days of starting at PGA, I had to find skills within myself well beyond engineering numbers and designing bridges. I had to learn about marketing, networking, sales, business financials, and a whole slew of things that were not taught in engineering school. But that faith in myself that I would emerge a better and stronger person led to personal discoveries that exceeded my wildest expectations. “Looking back seven years later, I think the simple fact that I believed and loved the business line I was tasked with building countered all the risks and challenges that came with it.” The journey to get to where our structures group is now, a staff of thirteen professionals, was no bed of roses. Failures, (many failures) happened along the way. Lost proposals, sleepless nights, and just getting beat by other AEC firms that have been doing this a lot longer was common. In the end, failures don’t define us. Wear your failures like a badge of honor. Every time we lost a proposal, we debriefed and listened to the winning team. What better way to rise than to learn from your mistakes? Again, set your ego aside and use failure to learn. Some of those lost pursuits were actually blessings in disguise since it prepared us for the next winning pursuit, which
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THE ZWEIG LETTER DECEMBER 6, 2021, ISSUE 1419
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