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Driven to do good: Steve Baldridge President of Baldridge & Associates Structural Engineering, a full-service structural and forensic consulting firm based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
A boutique firm focusing on buildings, BASE has the resume of a larger firm, yet provides the personalized service common in smaller firms. In his career, Baldridge has worked on more than 60 major projects – both domestic and international, including 16 high-rise buildings. “While we embrace cutting edge technology in the AEC industry, it’s often over-promised and under-delivered,” Baldridge says. “For the near term, there really is no substitution for a good engineer who is a problem-solver and listens to our clients.” A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE BALDRIDGE. The Zweig Letter: What are the three to four key business performance indicators that you watch most carefully? Do you share that information with your staff? Steve Baldridge: Rather than watch multiple indicators,
I think the most important one to pay attention to is the quality of our firm’s work; there’s no easy way to measure that other than maybe repeat work or client satisfaction. We do watch project budgets, but more as a way to set pricing and budgets for future work. If a project is over budget, we don’t really back off on our efforts to put out a good project. You can’t, however, run a business doing quality work that you can’t make money on so you do need to understand why a project may have gone sideways financially and endeavor not to repeat that cycle. TZL: Artificial intelligence and machine learning are potential disruptors across all industries. Is your firm exploring how to incorporate these technologies into providing improved services for clients? SB: The use of the words “artificial intelligence” can be a bit misleading. In our industry, what level of intelligence are we really at in AI? It might be that of a child or a teenager with no common sense. If you look at the recent experience with Boeing and AI in the cockpit, for
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