Engineers Let Themselves Become a Commodity (And Doctors Didn’t) | EP 172

All right, so the first big idea that I want to talk to you about in today's episode is this concept of like death by a thousand cuts.

Like this issue in our industry didn't happen overnight.

It's happened one yes at a time.

And I want to talk you through like what's really happened over the course of our industry and comparing our profession, the engineering built environment profession to that of say doctors.

So what's happened over time team is, you know, doctors have gone this way because they kept saying no.

So they kept saying no to fee cuts, they kept saying no to people asking them to lower their prices and that sort of stuff.

And what's happened over here, and I'll talk about profit in a second, is their margins and their profit margins are up here.

Whereas us, engineers in built environment as an industry, we've kept saying yes.

So every time a client asks us, to drop our fees, we say yes.

Every time a client says, can you just get it done quicker, we say yes.

Every time they say, just get one more thing done for the same amount of fees, we keep saying yes.

And so this concept of, it just didn't happen overnight.

Like it happened one yes at a time.

We didn't wake up one day and just go, all of a sudden we're a commodity.

We made decisions throughout the entire course of our industry, discounting, rush scopes, shortcuts, they just became normalized.

So every time we say yes to unreasonable requests from our clients, we reset the expectations with our clients.

And so over time, Clients stopped feeling funny about asking us.

They stopped seeing boundaries in place because we stopped holding them accountable, stopped pushing back on our clients.

So the first big idea is like, we're all angry, we're all frustrated, we're annoyed this keeps happening, but I want to point the finger at the fact that this didn't happen overnight.

It's happened one yes at a time.

And so now it's up to us as a profession to start to go, you know what, enough's enough.

We need to start saying no, setting boundaries, and having those hard conversations with clients.

And That's not gonna be easy because we have trained our clients over the last 15, 20, 50, 100 years, whichever timeframe you wanna go to, to keep expecting us to say yes.