So I did that for a long time. It’s very intense. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of long hours. It’s a lot of high-stress deadlines.
John Corcoran: 09:11
You’re there’s a lot of money on the line. Right. These are like multi-hundred-million-dollar projects that are hundreds.
Jennifer McPherson: 09:17
Of millions of dollars in these projects. And so there’s a lot of money on the line. You’re, you know, putting it all together and submitting it. And you know it’s just a lot of high stress. There’s a drop-dead date.
Everything’s coming in. Everything’s always changing. You’re changing all these things. So it’s very stressful. I think I lasted a lot longer than most people last in that career.
John Corcoran: 09:44
So what was the vision behind starting the agency then, and how is your role different now?
Jennifer McPherson: 09:50
Well, the vision was I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something in the industry, but something a little different. And I did work on some public involvement components while I was working for engineers, and I decided to start an agency that provided marketing services for engineering companies, branding all the services, doing collateral and things like that. But then also that did public involvement on transportation infrastructure projects. So I started that seven and a half years ago and we took off like a rocket.
And honestly, we I think we did, because when you’re providing public involvement on transportation projects you are providing, you’re selling a story of why this project? What is this project, how it impacts you to people who are not engineers, to these are people that live in these communities. They drive through the communities. They walk through these communities. And so it affects them in their everyday life.
And so being able to take these projects, engineering speak and then bring that down to a level where they can understand and really have some feedback and provide you with effective feedback that you can take back to the engineers to, you know, in their design, maybe make some changes if need be was a natural transition.
John Corcoran: 11:23
So I want to ask about that, the communication strategies around it and how it’s changed. But first, how did you come up with that name? Tell me about that.
Jennifer McPherson: 11:33
Well it’s chicken and go you’re super close.
John Corcoran: 11:35
Chicken mango chicken mango.
Jennifer McPherson: 11:38
Yeah I came up with it because when I left the world of engineering, I didn’t want it to be last names or initials, because that is every engineering company that you see out there in the universe.
John Corcoran: 11:50
Yes.
Jennifer McPherson: 11:51
And so I could not think of a name and Chickenango popped in my head because I lived in upstate New York, my husband and I moved from Washington State, where he was landed in the Navy, but he was from upstate. We moved out to upstate New York to Cazenovia. One of my daughters was only four. And right next to us was a town called Chittenango, and that’s where we went and got ice cream and pizza. So it was kind of a fun place to go.
She couldn’t say the name. She called it chicken mango and.
John Corcoran: 12:22
Oh, that’s perfect.
Jennifer McPherson: 12:22
It popped in my head and I was like, okay, chicken mango.
John Corcoran: 12:25
And what was your family’s reaction? You’ve got five kids. And what was your family’s reaction like when you’re like, after 27 years, like, I’m going to go start my own business.
Jennifer McPherson: 12:35
Oh, they didn’t , they didn’t even think anything of it.
John Corcoran: 12:41
No, no, they didn’t.
Jennifer McPherson: 12:43
They didn’t. I mean, now I think they’re incredibly proud of me now. But at first they were probably just like every other human being when I said I’m going to start my own business and was like, oh, that’s so cute. I mean, that’s kind of what you get. Oh.
So cute. Oh, she’s gonna have a little bit of business. Yeah. You know.
John Corcoran: 13:04
But I guess, I mean, I guess considering sometimes, you know, I’ve interviewed people that have said like, oh, my family said it was crazy, or why are you doing this? Or why would you leave this stable career after 27 years? I guess not having something like that at least. Yeah. It was good.
Jennifer McPherson: 13:19
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my husband wholeheartedly supported me because I don’t know, the stress level that’s involved in putting together these multi millions of dollars worth of proposals is intense.
John Corcoran: 13:36
And so. So you did you I mean, because it’s stressful to own your own business, but do you have an expectation that the stress level would go down by switching to your own, your own agency?
Jennifer McPherson: 13:46
Yeah. And in a way it has. In other ways it hasn’t. But you know, the other part of starting my company is I provided a lot of opportunities for people within our industry because I had a couple of people come over from the engineering industry that I knew. And the most exciting part for me was to provide an opportunity where they were never, ever sitting in an office at 1 a.m. in the morning working on a proposal by themselves, like, I’m like, I will never do that to my people, ever.
That’s never going to be the case if you come and you work here. So I think for me that was a big deal. Just being able to have that kind of level of control on what we’re willing to accept as okay and what we’re not willing to accept.
John Corcoran: 14:40
Let’s talk about what you were saying earlier about communication strategies. Because in these big public infrastructure projects that are happening, well, let’s say there’s once the project is happening, but it sounded like you were also talking about getting the public involved, maybe on a scoping level or before the project is created. So, you know, talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you employ to get busy citizens to be interested and involved in some public infrastructure project that might take ten years or more to complete and cause a lot of disruption in the meantime.
Jennifer McPherson: 15:20
Yeah. So basically there’s I mean, there’s more types than this, but if I had to put it into compartments, there’s three types of projects. There’s planning, there’s design and there’s construction. So planning is when you’re first thinking about doing something, you might have a multimodal plan that you want to implement in your city, where right now it might be difficult for some people who might only use bicycles, or people that might be walking or, you know, people that have mobility issues to be able to get from point A to point B. And so you want to look at this big overarching plan to say, okay, how can we improve and improve the mobility in this city?
And that’s the planning component. And then you have design. Once you go into all the plans and you figure out, okay, this is what we put on some public meetings. We did some pop up events. We got some really good feedback from people on how they use this space and how they use this whole entire corridor.
Now we’re going to take this plan. We’re going to write it, put it into a plan. And then a lot of that time, out of that plan comes several different opportunities for designs. So design of improvement of sidewalks, improvement of bike trails or signals or roadways in the area. So that’s where design comes in.
And that is true engineering. You have engineers putting together plans that will then take those plans and go from that design into construction.
John Corcoran: 17:04
And that image involves public meetings and online collection of comments and things like that. Is your company coming in and facilitating workshops and public meetings?
Jennifer McPherson: 17:16
Yes. Yep. Absolutely. Especially in the planning phase, that’s where you will get public meetings. Public meetings have evolved.
We still do public meetings, but there’s a lot more pop up type events where you’re going to events where people already are. So you get a wider range.
John Corcoran: 17:39
I’ve seen that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where there’ll be a, you know, some fair or festival or something like that. And like the local city engineering office will be there to gather feedback on something. Sometimes they get quite creative about it. They might have some, like some activity to try and engage you and get you involved in it.
Jennifer McPherson: 17:54
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We, you know, we’ll go to those events and we’ll actually go out into the crowd and ask people questions and ask them how they’re using the corridor. We also did one at a local ice cream shop where we went to the ice cream shop, and we hung out inside the ice cream shop so that we got a wider range of people that we normally wouldn’t, we wouldn’t.
John Corcoran: 18:18
Show up to like a public, you know, comment meeting on infrastructure or something. Yeah, yeah. Which is a limited range of people that show up to those.
Jennifer McPherson: 18:26
It is. It’s pretty much the same people all the time.
John Corcoran: 18:30
Right, right, right. Yeah. I served as chair of my town’s planning commission for a number of years. And okay, can get quite contentious when people get, you know, involved in these things if it affects their property rights, especially, how do you deal with, you know, personalities like that that are starting to get upset about changes?
Jennifer McPherson: 18:51
Yeah. Well, that happens all the time. And you just have to be able to listen. You’ve got to be able to actively listen to people. And I think that the most important skill that you can have when you’re in one of those situations, is just being able to hear what they’re saying.
If you cannot hear what they’re saying, you’re always trying to respond to them or throw out a response, then they know that you’re not hearing them and all they want to be is heard. And so I think just being able to, you know, fine tune your ability to actually hear what people are saying and then just reiterate it back to them. You can’t solve their problem like nobody can. Like the world doesn’t always come down to, I’m able to solve this little problem over here. You’ve got a lot of moving parts, you’ve got a lot of people, especially in these big infrastructure projects.
But just being given the opportunity to be heard is really important for these people.
John Corcoran: 19:58
Yeah. What was it like? You start the firm and I think about two years after that, the pandemic hits. You know, you’re a newer business owner. What was going through your mind as that happened?
Jennifer McPherson: 20:12
Well, I was concerned at first. I was like, oh my gosh, how is this going to affect me? Because everything was being shut down. But you know, what wasn’t shut down was all of the infrastructure projects. In fact, they finished in record time during the pandemic because there were not as many people out on the road.
Yeah, yeah.
John Corcoran: 20:35
I mean.
Jennifer McPherson: 20:36
Seriously, so our staff just kept going. I learned that, I don’t know, I worried maybe for 1 or 2 months and then I could see, wait a minute, nothing’s shutting down. In fact, the dot here was like, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. You know?
John Corcoran: 20:54
So yeah, there were a lot of projects, I think, that were fast tracked. Because of that, they realized, okay, once people are going to be, they’re not going to be as many people out and about. Let’s work on some big projects. Yes. Yeah.
And then it became, of course, like kind of an economic stimulus as well.
Jennifer McPherson: 21:07
Yes. Absolutely.
John Corcoran: 21:08
Yeah. Yeah. What have been some of the challenges with the company, with having the agency going from being an employee to, you know, having your, you know, responsible for your own thing.
Jennifer McPherson: 21:21
Oh. Which one? How many?
John Corcoran: 21:25
Pick a couple. Yeah. How much time do I have?
Jennifer McPherson: 21:27
You know, the probably the biggest challenge is going from knowing how to do one thing. Like, I know how to do the thing, but. Yeah, and then running a business, which is a whole nother thing. So that was the biggest challenge. It’s just kind of figuring out your lane and how you know what you’re doing inside of the business, because at some point you grow big enough that you really need to work on the business.
And you’re not the one doing all the things. You now have employees that are doing the things, and they have very specific roles. And just understanding when you need to not jump back in and be in that role and stay kind of in your lane.
John Corcoran: 22:15
Yeah.
Jennifer McPherson: 22:16
And let them stay in their lane. And so that was a big challenge for a while for me, and I think I’ve overcome that pretty well.
John Corcoran: 22:24
Yeah. And you have a cool project that’s coming out if you’re working on a proposal automation software or tool specifically for architects and engineers and construction. Talk about this.
Jennifer McPherson: 22:35
Yes. So over the last year and a half, I’ve really dug deep into AI. You know, a lot of people are like, you’re either for it or you’re like, oh, I’m not going to touch that. That’s just a fad. And yeah, like a big hoopla or whatever they want to call it.
But I really took a deep dive into it, not just ChatGPT, but all kinds of different programs and figuring out some of the things that I could do with these programs is unbelievable. And the amount of efficiency that we can create for our own company and using AI and the fact that I’ve done proposals for 27 years and I will tell you, the proposal process is just I’ve worked in many companies, big, medium, small engineering companies, and it’s always the same. You’re always stressed out, you’re always overburdened, you’re always looking for this project description and you have a database. But why isn’t it here? And this person wrote it last time and you’re going back to these old proposals and it is just a nightmare.
So I have created an automated system that uses AI and your own data to not only qualify an RFP, that yes, this is something that your team would go after. Then it goes through all of the data and all the data points, like where is a proposal? Where whereas who has worked in this project and it goes all the way through and spits out at the other end a 90% complete proposal. So it’s game changing, especially for people like me, who are inside of the industry.
John Corcoran: 24:33
Those long nights working on those projects? Yeah.
Jennifer McPherson: 24:36
Game changer, game changer. So we’re hoping to launch it here in the next three months.
John Corcoran: 24:41
How has it been to work on?
Jennifer McPherson: 24:43
So it might be a little bit longer.
John Corcoran: 24:45
How has it been to work on that project? You know, you got the agency which is kind of your bread and butter, and then you have this future project that you’re working on. How have you balanced the workload and how have you, you know, figured out how to navigate developing a software?
Jennifer McPherson: 25:01
Well, I have engineers helping me, so I’m not developing it. Yeah, I’m not the one developing it. But in the last year and a half I’ve really learned to, and I will. I’m going to name drop. Can I name drop?
John Corcoran: 25:18
Sure.
Jennifer McPherson: 25:20
Thanks to Jason Swank because his. Yep. Hi. I joined his community and it really changed how I thought about being a business owner and the things that I did inside of my business. So before that, I was like in it and now I’m on it.
And so it really freed up enough time for me to realize, look, this is the most important project that I need to be driving down the road right now, because I know this will help a lot of people. So that’s kind of, I guess, how I do it.
John Corcoran: 25:57
That’s great. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Jennifer, thank you so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you?
And I don’t know if there’s any information available for people around the software yet, but at least the agency. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Jennifer McPherson: 26:15
Well, they’re LinkedIn. I’m all over LinkedIn. Jennifer McPherson. And then my website is chickenango.com spelled chickenango.com.
And yeah, that’s I guess where the two spots that I hang out the most.
John Corcoran: 26:36
Is your daughter pretty proud that she named your company?
Jennifer McPherson: 26:40
I’m sure she is.
John Corcoran: 26:43
That’s great.
Jennifer McPherson: 26:43
Especially now that she’s a mom. So she’s got a 18 months old. So.
John Corcoran: 26:48
Oh, great.
Jennifer McPherson: 26:48
She has a greater appreciation of those cute little languages.
John Corcoran: 26:53
Nice. All right, Jennifer, thanks so much.
Jennifer McPherson: 26:55
Thank you.
Outro: 26:58
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.