ENTRUST has adapted and grown throughout the last two decades. Adam Biggam, Michael Glynn, Jamie Jones, and John Wilson each volunteered to talk about how they describe ENTRUST. They came up with four words: Brilliant, Energetic, Collaborative, and Family.
I started with ENTRUST back in 2005, and have been with the company for 18 years. After completing my studies at the University of Illinois, I worked for Chicago’s gas utility, which helped prepare me for the industry. From there, I came over to EN Engineering, as it was called at the time. Back then, we were only a 60-person company in Woodridge, Illinois. It was a very tight-knit, supportive group, and I learned a great deal from some very experienced and interesting people.
Opening the Baltimore office as our first remote office was probably the best experience of my career to date. It was unique in that you wear a lot of different hats when you’re opening a new office. You have to find the office space, you need to hire new employees and train them–so you’re doing things like HR, but you’re also acting as an office manager while executing projects as well. It was a great experience and taught me a lot about how to run an effective and efficient business.
Over the last 20 years, the company has experienced tremendous growth and I’ve been very fortunate to have grown right along with the company. I’ve taken on several different roles within the organization, and have grown into the role that I’m in today.
Our secret to success is our valued employees. We are focused on developing them, bringing them into a best-in-class organization, training them, giving them guidance, mentoring, and really providing all the tools that they need to succeed at our company. We help accelerate careers by giving people an opportunity to move into a leadership or a management role–maybe before they would at other organizations–because we’re confident in the training and the tools that we’ve given them to succeed. That is a very unique part of our organization – our people and the great value that they add for our customers, along with the training and quality that we bring for anyone new that joins our organization.
We’re very active in the utility space at ENTRUST. A lot of the things that we see are really focused around the grid today. This includes grid modernization and preparing for extreme weather events – making sure that we help our customers to protect their facilities and their infrastructure against challenging or unexpected events. We help support our customers by providing complete data solutions for all of their needs. With so many connected devices in today’s society, through the use of fiber and telecom, there is a tremendous amount of data flowing. What you do with the data is very important, which is where ENTRUST can provide solutions.
I see the greatest growth potential in the key areas that we serve today, such as the utility space in both gas and electric. Those areas will continue to experience high levels of growth and will need support—which ENTRUST is here to provide.
We see acquisitions as a big part of our growth story. We are very focused on growing our internal organization and making sure that we’re doing the right things organically. We have also added some tremendous partners, including 16 companies over the course of my time at ENTRUST. We will continue to look for great partners, whether to add new services, new geographies, or new customers. Recently, we have been excited to add best-in-class organizations FibeRise and Magellan to our portfolio.
One word I’d use to describe ENTRUST is ‘brilliant.’ The ENTRUST culture is created from a phenomenal group of individuals who come together with a common mission to do good, upgrade infrastructure, help each other and be collaborative as a group. This talented group of people are focused on quality and making sure that we always deliver for our customers.
These days, there is a lot of talk about decarbonization. Our clients are always looking for ways to decarbonize and become net zero by 2050, and adopting hydrogen is one thing that they can do to significantly reduce carbon.
As hydrogen is a new, renewable industry, there are a lot of pilot programs moving forward with providing decarbonization options. ENTRUST is right there at the beginning. We have a subject matter expert in our Atlanta office that has been working in the R&D for hydrogen for several years, and is probably one of the best subject matter experts in the nation.
We’re always trying to look at what our clients can do to meet their net zero goals in the most efficient way. We’ll try to perform projects more efficiently, reduce carbon, and then go to the next level, which is taking an in-depth look at renewable natural gas. Renewable natural gas uses biogas, which is landfill gas animal waste. These come out of the digesters or out of the landfill as biogas. It’s dirty – it’s not pipeline quality. So, we work with gas processors to clean it up, and we work on the pipeline and the facilities to make sure that they’re getting clean pipeline gas.
ENTRUST Solutions group has always been about culture. It’s about the people. And that starts from the top. It’s a place where everyone feels like an important part of a team. When we first started with just 60 people, we were like a family. As we have continued to grow to over three thousand people, the company culture has continued to feel like that of a small company. We’re very diverse, but all treated equally.
One word I’d use to describe ENTRUST would be ‘energetic.’ I have been involved in the business development side for the last six years. Working directly with clients to solve their needs, you must be energetic. Our growth has been phenomenal, and that is thanks to the people that work for us, and the energy they bring to work every day.
ENTRUST can support a lot of different renewable projects– from battery storage to wind to PV or solar, hydrogen, and renewable natural gas. We offer support through upfront consulting all the way to construction management and commissioning. We can support our power generation clients with a niche suite of services due to a few recent acquisitions of Turbine Generator Advisers, as well as Kestrel Power Engineering, with strong focus on turbine generator engineering and NERC compliance. We also offer a suite of services to support the balance of plant as well as controls and protection. We can provide our utility clients with a range of different services, from consulting and planning all the way through regulatory compliance and distribution engineering on both the gas and the electric side, as well as transmission and substation engineering.
Essentially, ENTRUST is diversified in so many industries and across many service areas. This allows us to talk to multiple clients about how we can help them in a variety of facets of their business, while also creating career paths for our own employees.
One word I’d use to describe ENTRUST’s culture is ‘family.’ There is no one ‘type’ of ENTRUST employee – everyone is made to feel like they fit in, and that their opinion matters. Along with that, there is a company culture of mutual trust. And our clients trust our people. We have a reputation of hiring top talent, training them, and providing some great career paths to fulfill their individual career goals.
Joining ENTRUST as part of an acquisition was fairly seamless, and I have loved the welcoming environment that ENTRUST has provided. I believe that ENTRUST differentiates from other consulting and engineering firms in the fact that we have a lot of amazing experts who are really passionate about the work that they do. It is rare to encounter people who demonstrate such dedication to their customers and their projects in providing quality work.
ENTRUST’s greatest advantage is that we are a large company that provides very focused services to our customers, as if we were a small company. We hold the same values of a small company, yet we have the reach of a large company by leveraging a range of technical skill sets along with different areas of the market.
The company culture of ENTRUST is cohesive, along with great communication. Every time I’ve reached out to anyone within the company, they have been more than happy to help, but also show me the way, and that has been a wonderful experience. Within Northern California, where I work, ENTRUST performs a great deal of community outreach through internships at both high school and college levels, as well as reaching out to underserved communities by way of engagement, time and donations. If I had to describe ENTRUST in one word, it would be ‘collaborative.’