Surface Water Solutions: Celebrating 5 Years Young!
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
We’ve had to make a slight little adaptation to our business plan due to global events…
2016-2020 business model:
2021 business model:
Time keeps flowing like a river
– Alan Parsons
Five years ago this month I dove off a cliff and plunged into the pool of self-employment, optimistically (and perhaps a bit naively) telling my family that the water would be just fine out here. Well, this wild adventure has definitely topped “just fine,” and I’m very grateful to my clients who have made it all possible by taking a gamble: trusting a sole trader with some very challenging engineering projects and training programmes.
Early in my career back in the U.S., I had been told that I would never work for a small company, and that I would certainly never work for myself due to pre-existing conditions clauses in our broken medical insurance system. So I never thought this scenario would actually become an option for me; yet here we are! Forgive me as I reflect over the last five years, but here’s bit of a recap by the numbers:
- 120 live courses (remember those?)
- 250 online courses (looking likely to be here to stay…)
- 28 countries and 44 U.S. states visited
- Enough rental car miles to circle the globe
- Enough frequent flyer miles to reach the moon (that’s 240,000!)
- 800+ hydraulic models with 300+ project reports delivered
- 85 consulting clients
- 25 webinars hosted with over 15,000 live attendees
- Half a million YouTube views of tutorial videos and webinar recordings
- 15 industry conferences with 8 conference publications
- And perhaps the most challenging hurdle of all: 8 Australian citizenship certificates!
Just counting up these statistics feels a bit exhausting; I could keep adding to the list, but overriding all of these numbers are the countless family milestones that I have been lucky enough to be a part of by working from home. This job even allowed me to cart the family along as my helpers on business trips – at least in the pre-COVID world – seeing some very diverse parts of the world wherever we could squeeze sight-seeing in between the training courses.
Even with the current travel bans in force, the global connections have managed to continue virtually. The view of the world in this map sums it all up for me, marking the locations of registrants attending just one series of webinars from among those that I’ve been able to host over the last five years:
As I stare into my webcam and kick off each webinar while the kids are running around the house, it’s hard to imagine the wide-ranging backgrounds of each of the participants around the world – and the unique challenges that everyone might be facing. It is both humbling and encouraging to be a part of the global water resources community, and I treasure the relationships with the amazing people that I’ve had the opportunity to engage with over the years.
Sometimes I sit on these panels with well-respected experts in their respective fields, and I think to myself, “what the hell am I doing here?” I’m about to hit 50 this year, which takes me well into old-timer status myself; so maybe by now I ought to know what I’m doing; but I have to admit, sometimes I still feel like that college student or intern watching the real engineers do their thing while I’m just winging it the best I can.
And I guess that’s the secret that I’m just now discovering…so is everybody else! We’re all just trying to do our best, finding a role to play in this world and relying on others with expertise in their particular fields…because nobody knows it all. But when you add it all up and take the cumulative sum total of our “winging-it” skills, we can do some pretty awesome things together.
Sometimes it feels rewarding to fly around on Google Earth and see the implemented projects that I’ve been able to participate in, especially the restoration/rehabilitation jobs. But at the same time, it can also be depressing to see desiccated lakes and contaminated sediment plumes along the way that show how badly we can screw things up when potential impacts are ignored. And as far as the little niche I’ve carved out for myself, I do believe that arming the world with improved simulations and the ability to assess the long-term consequence of our actions can help steer us toward a more sustainable future.
Each dot on that spinning globe marks the whereabouts of one of my fellow colleagues around the world, each trying their best to get water where it’s needed and prevent it from going where it might cause harm. When we dive into healthy academic debates about how water moves across time and space, the discussions seem to be unobstructed by political divisions and national borders; the laws of physics set the rules, and we’re just trying our best to mimic the reaction of water molecules using bits and bytes inside a computer. Un-spun science becomes the overarching truth, and building on our cumulative know-how, we seem to keep getting better and better at understanding the movement of water every year. I can only hope that the community spirit that we can sense on our global webinars – which has helped drive some of the far-reaching advances in water modelling – trickles into other realms of life that currently seem to be marred by so many forms of territorialism.
So enough rambling: I can only imagine what might have transpired by the time I check back in at the 10-year mark, but in the meantime, here’s to five years in business and to many more to come!
– For those in the Perth area, the current gathering limits might delay the party, but stay tuned for an invite to an open house celebration at our place up in the hills as soon as the restrictions are lifted.
– For those in the rest of the world, I look forward to continued interaction online until we can get back to traveling and have the chance to connect in person.
Looking back on these last five years, this venture has by far exceeded my expectations on all fronts. Except one: At the onset I told my family I was planning to go out on my own in order to work less. Well, that definitely didn’t happen! Maybe I should have known better, and I owe them an apology for that little miscalculation, but I’m sure glad they had my back as I took the plunge. Thanks again to all of you who have helped make this dream job of mine a reality!
Around the world from Kalamazoo
And just for nostalgia’s sake, here are a few images from the first year in business back in 2016 when travel was still a thing:
I always got some strange looks with my standard procedure of pushing 12 laptops through security (never trusted them in the checked bags!)
I generally had the manuals printed locally for pickup on arrival, so I didn’t have to haul them on the plane. I’d assemble them myself, so this is a pretty typical 2-am shot of my hotel room:
Set up for class:
Go-time:
“I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
Turn and face the strange changes.”