Aaron Rader, Vice President, Kimley-Horn

For Kimley-Horn, growing means growing the people and the talent of the company. “We’re going to predominantly grow by growing our people, not through big mergers and acquisitions,” Aaron Rader, vice president of the engineering and design consulting firm, told Invest:.

What are your priorities in your new role at Kimley-Horn in North Texas?

A lot of my priorities focus on our people. We want to develop our people and foster our core purpose, which is to provide an environment for our people to flourish. My role is to make sure we’re living out that core purpose — with our people and with our clients. We like to grow with our clients and help direct and shape the future of our industry and the communities where we live, play, and work.

What factors make North Texas an ideal location for Kimley-Horn’s operations? 

We opened our first office in the North Texas region in 1984, serving a wide variety of clients and industries, with opportunities that continue to grow. This growth allows our employees to contribute in many ways, making us an even stronger part of the community fabric. DFW is appealing to Kimley-Horn because of its opportunities, and we continue to thrive here, just as we have for the past 40-plus years. Many large companies relocate to the metroplex due to the cost of living and the ability to hire and retain talent.

What plans are you seeing in urban planning and infrastructure development?

We’re seeing a lot of opportunities across all sectors of planning, whether it’s urban planning, comprehensive planning, or infrastructure planning, thoroughfare plans, or water and wastewater master plans. With the growing number of companies and homeowners coming into the area, the need for additional infrastructure continues to grow, and the need to plan that out so that it grows well is critical. There is a lot of increased effort in our planning groups, and in all facets of our market sectors.

How are you advising your clients to navigate the current economic challenges? 

Funding is a hot topic across many of the public agencies and clients we serve. Finding alternative funding sources for clients during a period when interest rates are still elevated and the cost of capital just keeps going up, is an important factor for us and something we pride ourselves on helping our clients do. This applies not only to the public sector, which is seeing an increase in funding, but also to the private sector. 

There’s a variety of different funding sources that are out there and available. But it’s about understanding the client’s needs and capabilities, and assisting them with finding the right financial avenue to fund their projects. We have groups and teams of people that are focused on helping those clients. 

Along those same lines, we’ve seen a lot of success in the relationship and partnership between clients, contractors, and consultants. Collaborative delivery is an increasing trend in North Texas that’s helping clients know where they stand on budgets earlier. It gives contractors a seat at the design table to help provide for better efficiency in the design, and then allows us, as consultants, to tailor our design to meet the best needs of the clients while also understanding the budget impacts. In the city of Anna, for instance, we have a client that has experienced rapid growth and needed the city to expand its wastewater treatment plant. We were able to implement a collaborative design project with the city of Anna on their wastewater treatment plant to help them plan for this and to get the contractor at the table early to understand the cost of the project as it moved along. 

How are you attracting and retaining top talent?

Recruiting continues to be a challenge we’re seeing in the DFW market, both college hires and others. While we regularly review our hiring metrics, we always maintain our high standards without compromising on the quality of talent that we seek. Similarly, the same holds true when we talk about our clients. Ninety percent of our business comes from repeat work. We want to make sure the people we’re hiring are able to serve our clients at the same high level we have been delivering for so many years. We are constantly looking at our hiring best practices and factors like the types of schools from which we recruit, and the diversity we look for, across disciplines and across majors. For instance, we’ve been able to be successful at hiring non-civil engineering grads to do engineering-type work. They’re not signing and sealing, but we’re hiring other skilled workers to be able to do things that a typical college graduate would have done. We are continuing to find ways to do that.

We’re involved in campuses, trying to help students understand and select a path of engineering, whether that be civil engineering, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering. We have places for all those students. Our internship program is robust. We hire close to 150 or so interns just in my region alone. We’ll hire over a thousand across the firm next year. 

As far as retention goes, we’re fortunate to be one of Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work For for 17 years. That says something about the company. When we provide that environment for our people to flourish and we hold to the core purpose we have, it allows people to go through their careers working on things they enjoy and to be rewarded and recognized in a way that’s important to them.

What are your top priorities for the next few years? 

Our people are my top priority and continuing to provide that environment for them to flourish. We’re going to predominantly grow by growing our people, not through mergers and acquisitions. If we are providing that environment for our people to flourish, that will allow us over the next few years to continue to move and adapt with our clients in different ways. It allows our people to be nimble and focused on providing our clients with the services they need, rather than someone telling them they need to do this or that. That allows us to have that 90% repeat work. 

When we keep our people first, staying in front of the market trends, whether it’s more spacious greenfields, or urban infills, like we’re seeing across Dallas and Fort Worth, having that foresight to plan and align with our market helps us to better position ourselves to continue to grow in the coming years. We continue to focus on developing leaders internally to meet the demands of expanding our offices across different regions.