Cultivate Friends Not the Business

Cultivate Friends Not the Business

Trudi Williams started her engineering firm out of her home in 1989. Today, TKW Consulting Engineers is on track to generate $8 million in revenues.

COVER STORY by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

Trudi Williams became an engineer on a dare.

After a stint as a cardiac nurse, Williams started down the long academic path to medical school in 1976. Then, a friend told her she could never be an engineer because she didn't have the brains for math.

If there's anything you should know about Williams, it's this: Don't tell her there's something she can't do.

Williams became a structural engineer in 1981, and eight years later founded a successful Fort Myers-based civil engineering firm called TKW Consulting Engineers. The firm now has 65 employees and offices in Orlando and Jacksonville. In July, Williams won the prestigious Professional Engineers in Private Practice award from the National Society of Professional Engineers, which recognizes an engineer who has made an outstanding contribution to the role of private practice while serving in the public interest.

As a first-term Florida representative, Williams shepherded the legislation that allowed the state to spend $310 million to buy about 74,000 acres of Babcock Ranch for environmental preservation. The ranch straddles Charlotte and Lee counties.

"I can tell you one thing: She can juggle lots of balls at the same time," says former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, now a government-affairs consultant who has worked with Williams on several occasions.

Modest beginnings

Fluent in French, Williams moved to Fort Myers in 1968 when she was 15 years old after having lived in France where her father worked for NATO. Like many people whose first language is not English, she still does mental math in French.

After high school, she spent time in Atlanta as a nurse and settled on attending medical school. After following through on the dare, she became a civil engineer in 1981 and then worked for several Fort Myers firms.

But Williams, whose husband of 26 years runs his own engineering firm in Fort Myers, had two children born at risk of sudden infant-death syndrome. So in 1988 she decided to work from home, which back then was still a novel concept. "A friend of mine said you can do this on your own," she recalls. She formed TKW in 1989 and named the firm after the initials of her name.

The first few years were tough. "Engineering is not a women-dominated business," she says. "It was hard to prove that you were a good engineer."

Even in the early 1990s, Williams says the network of engineers in Southwest Florida was closed to women. But she says that made her firm better. "Our work was so scrutinized that we had to be better," Williams says.

But TKW was filling a niche because there weren't many structural engineers in Fort Myers when she started. Her first client was the Gasparilla Inn on Boca Grande. Gradually, she landed work with homebuilders such as GL Homes and First Home Builders and grew along with them. First Home eventually became Lee County's largest homebuilder.

As the business grew, so did the staff. Williams hired more engineers in the mid-1990s and started distancing herself from the day-to-day operations, preferring to generate new business for the firm. Back then, the competition for talent wasn't as fierce as it is today. "When we recruited these people it was before the big crunch," she says.

Williams says she has never had to borrow money to grow the firm. "We only lease the copier and the car," she says.

Public life brings exposure

Williams says she's more suited to public life than engineering. She's surprisingly frank: "[Engineering] was never a passion of mine."

Instead, Williams says what she enjoys doing is building the business by cultivating friendships. "You don't cultivate the business, you cultivate the friends."

For example, she turned over the day-to-day operations of her firm to her staff in 1999 to serve on the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District. There, she worked closely with former Florida Gov. Martinez whose clients appeared before the board. "Gov. Martinez has become one of my dearest friends," she says.

In 2001, Williams was elected chair of the water management district, a position that gave her authority over an $800 million budget and contact with a wide range of potential clients. "That got my name out," she says.

The firm started landing jobs outside Fort Myers in places such as Orlando and Jacksonville, where TKW now has offices. It plans to open an office in Tallahassee this year.

What's more, Williams learned to handle the complex water issues that the district had to navigate, especially the battles between agriculture and development interests. "She had great training to enter the political world," Martinez says.

In 2002, Williams was appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Small Business, Agriculture and Labor Advisory Council through 2005. This further broadened her network of contacts.

Meanwhile, to reward her top managers and make sure their interest in the firm was aligned with hers, Williams gave them 10% of the company's stock. These included TKW President Shawn Anderson and Vice Presidents John Barker and Patrick Day.

"I was doing a lot of water management stuff and wanted to make sure they were appreciated and would step up to the plate," she says. "It takes a great deal of discipline and it takes a great deal of trust."

Florida House

Williams says running for political office was never in her plans until 2004. While she was attending a meeting of Republican supporters discussing who should run for the Fort Myers district of the Florida House of Representatives, she mentioned that her youngest child was leaving for college. They turned to her and suggested she run. "My husband said 'You're nuts,'" she recalls.

But she raised $184,000 in three months and won the election. "People know what I stand for," she says.

Her most significant legislative accomplishment was authoring legislation for the state to spend $310 million to preserve about 74,000 acres of Babcock Ranch (see related story). Gov. Jeb Bush signed the legislation in late May.

Williams was recently reelected when no one filed to run against her. She plans to serve out her term and says she's not planning beyond that point. Despite relinquishing the day-to-day management of TKW, she still meets with clients when they request it and stays in touch electronically. "I can check my computer and see how much money is in the bank," she says. TKW had revenues of $6.5 million in 2005 and she projects $8 million this year.

Gradually, Williams plans to sell TKW to her employees over the next six or seven years. For tax reasons, Williams gives bonuses to her employees that they then use to buy her stock. Currently, Williams says she owns 79% of the company and she says every manager now owns at least 1% of TKW. But she hopes to be bought out completely by early next decade.

"That's the plan," she says.

What It Takes

Engineers with the entrepreneurial bug might consider Trudi Williams' advice. Here's what she says is necessary to build a successful practice:

• Never, ever give up. Williams says there were many obstacles in her way and never giving up became an obsession that carried her business to success.

• Look ahead. Decide where you want your business to be five years from now. A good business plan will help you figure that out.

• Establish good relationships with clients and make sure they'll follow you when you start your own firm.

• Find a mentor or other trusted adviser to test your ideas. At first, this may be your accountant.

• Develop relationships with larger firms in your industry. They'll send jobs too small for them your way.

• Get involved in local charitable endeavors. It's a great way to make business connections, she says.

-Jean Gruss

Williams rustles Babcock Ranch to the wire

People who know Trudi Williams say she doesn't easily get upset. But she broke out in hives on the morning of May 5, the last day of the session of the Florida Legislature.

A bill she authored to approve state spending of $310 million to preserve 74,000 acres of Babcock Ranch straddling Charlotte and Lee counties was faltering and it appeared that the opportunity to safeguard the tract would collapse.

Fortunately, Florida State Rep. Paige Kreegel, a Punta Gorda physician, was there to give Williams a shot of steroids to help with the hives and carry her through what would be a 12-hour test of legislative endurance.

The Fort Myers freshman representative had a lot riding on the bill. She was a founding member of the Babcock Ranch Preservation Partnership, which has sought ways to buy and preserve the 91,000-acre ranch from the Babcock family.

The deal had all the ingredients for success: a developer who wanted to sell a large portion of the ranch for preservation, public support for the deal and bulging state coffers.

When West Palm Beach developer Syd Kitson, in partnership with Morgan Stanley, offered to sell the state 74,000 acres and develop the rest into a residential community, Williams was the clear choice to lead the legislative effort.

Kitson says he wasn't worried that the bill was in the hands of a relative neophyte in the Florida legislature. Williams was elected to her first term in August 2004. She was recently elected to a second term because no one filed to run against her.

"You love to start small, don't you?" Kitson remembers kidding Williams.

Williams' understanding of engineering and water management issues offset her legislative inexperience, Kitson says. "This had never been done before and nobody had a benchmark," he says.

When the Babcock family decided to sell the ranch three years ago, Williams says the key to preservation was the ranch being self-sustaining.

Currently, farming, ranching, cypress harvesting, hunting leases and ecotourism generate about $2.5 million of revenues annually. "The state is always a poor steward of land," Williams says.

So in the legislation she drafted, Williams included provisions for all those activities to continue so that the management of the lands didn't depend on the funding whims of legislators every year. She rallied the Southwest Florida legislative delegation to help sell the bill.

The deal had the support of the governor from the start. After meeting with Kitson, Gov. Jeb Bush said he would sign the bill spending the $310 million to preserve the land. Lee County is spending an additional $40 million for its portion of the land.

Although the state recorded a budget surplus this year, Williams says she still had to sell the deal to 120 legislators. Williams says a big selling point to other legislators for the deal was the fact that the ranch would be self-sustaining. "We worked it very hard," Williams says.

But the Florida Legislature is an unpredictable animal.

On the last day of the session, the deal began to unravel. Various environmental constituents, including the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, wanted to ban cypress harvesting, agriculture and hunting from the ranch. Even the National Rifle Association jumped into the fray, arguing that hunting on the ranch should be open to the public and that hunting leases should no longer be issued. The Senate bill omitted commercial activity except for the ecological tours.

Opposition to Williams' bill was growing as debate raged on the last day about what activities would be permitted on what would become state-owned land. Meanwhile, Kitson fretted that the bill was doomed and that he would fail to meet his July 31 deadline to buy the ranch from the Babcock family.

Kitson, who had been assured that the bill would pass and that his presence in Tallahassee might be a hindrance, was helping his daughter move out of her dorm at Wake Forest University on the last day of the session. "Here I was carrying this stuff up and down the stairs and I realized I was in the wrong place," says Kitson. "It was a nerve-wracking day."

As the day progressed, it appeared that Williams' bill and the Senate's version weren't going to be reconciled in time. So Williams gave in, agreeing to omit commercial activity except for the ecological tours. "We had to give up the sustainability," Williams says. "It took 12 hours to work out." The governor signed the bill in late May.

But Williams hasn't given up on the sustainability yet. She and other legislators plan to reintroduce a bill during the next session that would allow commercial activity to keep the ranch economically self-sufficient.

-Jean Gruss