When
University alumna Susan Rani founded her engineering consulting firm, she took
as her motto the famous declaration by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Today, it looks as if Rani doesn’t have much to fear anymore.
When she started her business in 1993, very few women engineers were in decision-making positions, she said.
But Rani was ready for the challenge. She had worked for a variety of public and private sector employers, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and Bechtel Power Corporation in San Francisco.
She also has what she believes it takes to be a successful entrepreneur—persistence, patience, and a willingness to take calculated risks.
“It’s difficult to take a risk, especially when you don’t know what the benefits are,” she said. “Yet that’s what you need to do to get started.”
Based in St. Paul, Minn., Rani Engineering provides civil, transportation, and water resources engineering services nationwide. Over the years, projects have included everything from levees to light rail.
Landing a design contract for a $5 million flood-control levee and walking trail in Lake County, Ind., was an early coup for the company. Having to commute back and forth and get approvals from local agencies was new and challenging then, but it also “gave us a lot of confidence,” Rani said.
One of her firm’s most high-profile projects was the new Hiawatha Light Rail Transit Line, which links downtown Minneapolis, the airport, and the Mall of America. For this Metropolitan Council project, Rani designed parking lots, drainage systems, and utility at rail stations.
More recently, the firm—now up to eight full-time employees and three part-timers—has conducted considerable business with wastewater treatment plants.
Originally from Korea, Rani came to the United States when she was 12 years old. With a mother who taught high school algebra and a father who was a civil and mechanical engineer, she, too, gravitated toward math and science.
Like her father, she chose to attend the University of Minnesota. She majored in engineering, she said, “because it was a well-respected profession, and you could earn a decent living after college.”
In addition to her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, which she completed in 1982, she also received an MBA from the Carlson School of Management in 1994. Both degrees give her credibility, but trial by fire has been the best teacher of all, she said.
For example, negotiating skills simply had to be learned the hard way. Some of the offers her company has received have been insulting, and the perception that women and minorities will do the same work for less money troubles her.
“One engineering company, which shall remain nameless, said we should be able to do a project for x [dollars], and I said, ‘For x [dollars], you can keep it,’” Rani said. Taking that risk paid off. The company called back and asked her to do the project—and to name her price.
She now spends less time on project details, devoting most of her efforts to communicating with clients, reviewing and submitting proposals, finding subcontractors, and working on staff development.
“We’ve been in business 13 years, and it takes that long to establish a track record,” Rani says. “Trust is very high on the list of selection criteria” for contract work.
Rani appreciates the strong support she’s received from her family while she’s endured the ups and downs of starting a company. Her husband, Robert, is an electrical engineer who graduated from the University in 1982, and they have two daughters ages 14 and 6.
“I spend less time with them than if I were an employee and not an active business owner,” she says, “but they understand Mom’s work is important and do their part to help the family.”
Every day in the CEO’s chair brings with it the responsibility for making many decisions. The good news, according to Rani, is that it gets easier with practice.
“As you make more and more decisions—good, bad, or indifferent—your quality of decisions improves,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is to be afraid to make a decision because you think you’ll fail.”
