Juggling technical and administrative responsibilities

Like most people, I struggle to juggle the various aspects of my life. I am not talking about family, friends, social activities or anything outside of work. I refer instead to my responsibilities as the managing partner of our firm. In that role, I have to juggle my administrative duties with my technical and managerial responsibilities. As a relatively young manager and as one with a strong entrepreneurial spirit who feels like it was only yesterday that I was in my attic, I have found delegating certain administrative duties a slow and difficult process. After all, don't entrepreneurs do everything themselves? It's the old chief cook and bottle washer mentality that I have had to overcome. Thankfully, I have a lot of help that I can rely upon. My office staff is wonderful and support my activities while enhancing our office morale. My partners share the psychological weight of my administrative duties although not all of the actual time spent on them. They were both administrators in their former lives and appreciate that they can concentrate on managing projects and chasing new business. Which leaves us with little old me. I crave being out there in design meetings and on job sites, talking systems and equipment and cogen and daylighting and LEED and NYSERDA and photovoltaics and displacement ventilation etc. etc. etc. Alas, I just do not have all the time that I wish I could have to research and discuss all these items. Our senior staff is charged with researching and mentoring other members of the firm all about all these new technologies so that we can go out on sales calls and to design kickoff meetings and regurgitate all this new found knowledge and claim it as our own. And this my friends is one of the secrets to our firms success and hopefully bright future. At this time of real or imagined pending national recession, where the lack of Joe America's discretionary cash is threatening to jeopardize our livelihoods, Glickman Engineering Associates is fortunate to be securing more of the work for which our clients have come to rely upon us to perform. Our firm does not specialize in large scale healthcare or in university campus type design (although if the work was offered my partners would probably say lets go for it). Instead, we specialize in large scale retail, high rise residential, hotel and commercial work. This type of work is more tailored to close principal involvement in all aspects of the job. For example, on the retail end, we have been fortunate to be involved with the MEP design on many large scale retail projects around the country. When it comes to your typical retail center, the MEP Engineers get involved in multiple phases of the project, including the design of core and shell, direct MEP design for store fitouts and coordination with the tenants MEP engineer when the tenant does not use us. As mentioned above, this requires heavy principal involvement to maintain continuity as these jobs happen over long spans of time. We were recently awarded two large scale retail jobs due to our specific experience with urban big box retail. Many developers and national retailers are used to single level big box retail on which you plop rooftop HVAC units and some exhaust fans and your design is done. With the trend toward urban retail, with big box retailers located in high riser buildings, the MEP design is much more complicated. Designs can include cooling towers, drycoolers, central boilers and even electric and gas chillers. This requires specialized experience with central systems and an ability to work with the leasing people to adjust the standard lease to specific urban requirements. Again, this is something that requires heavy principal involvement since there are legal issues involved on multiple levels. With talk of retailers slowing their expansion, we are fortunate that urban retail is still going strong. We hope that this trend will continue, for obviously selfish reasons, and that the recession passes without major consequences to our industry. David Glickman P.E., is a managing partner at Glickman Engineering Associates PLLC, New York, N.Y.