Exiting Gracefully: How Dmitry Smirnov And Dana McGlone Started A Business And Partnering With A Former Employer To Serve Clients Better

It’s no secret that the corporate world is becoming more and more suffocating. That is why people are finding ways to exit gracefully and break free from that structure. This is true for both Dmitry Smirnov and Dana McGlone who Stephen Jaye knows from his previous life as a meteorologist. Dmitry and Dana worked for the engineering sector and water resources sector. They join Stephen on today’s show to share how they went out on their own and built their own consulting business that allows them to choose the projects to work with in order to serve their clients better. Also, they talk about their possible partnership with a former employer on a fairly sizable project. Find out how that’s working out. --- Listen to the podcast here: Exiting Gracefully: How Dmitry Smirnov And Dana McGlone Started A Business And Partnering With A Former Employer To Serve Clients Better Welcome to the show. I originally was a meteorologist. I studied Meteorology and was fascinated with the weather from a young age. A lot of meteorology jobs go in a lot of different directions, and a surprising number of them are all about coding or about writing code, or sometimes even manual data entry. My guests are people I know from my previous life as a meteorologist who, in their pursuits, have found a way to break free from the corporate structure. As you know, the corporate structure is suffocating a lot of people. We have these old-school ideas, and I won’t go off too much on a tangent about it. I’ll let my guests do the talking. This episode’s guests are Dmitry Smirnov and Dana McGlone, who are the Cofounders of HydroMet Consulting. --- Dima and Dana, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having us. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks. To begin, tell us a little bit about your overall job functions. HydroMet Consulting, I want to orient everyone to what that means. Hydro means water, but maybe not everyone is familiar with what hydrometeorology is. I would caveat all of this by saying that we are one year into our startup. We are a very fluid company now in terms of our vision. We don’t have a niche that has its upsides, but also its downsides, but in terms of what we do individually, I would call myself the Scientist, which involves a lot of coding, but also a lot of brainstorming of ideas and throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what hits both in terms of day-to-day operations as well as pursuits for the future. It has been a dream project of ours to go out on our own for a while. Our focus is around heavy rainfall both forecasting and doing a little bit of post-season analysis for our clients. Both of our backgrounds overlap with mostly the engineering sector and water resources sector, so we like to define solutions for our clients that are both satisfactory to the meteorological side of science and solve the problems they’re having. One of the things that drew me to science originally when I selected a major many years ago was the idea of discovering things, being creative, and problem-solving in a way more about figuring things out. In the corporate structure, do you feel like a lot of scientists in general end up more in the realm of trying to figure out how to make a program work rather than the actual process of scientific discovery and the inquisitiveness and curious mindedness that go along with it? 'I don't feel like I'm letting anyone down when I say, 'Nope I don't have time for that.' Obviously one (of the best benefits of owning your own business) is you get to set your own hours and chose your workload.'Share on X Yeah. I think you’ve hit on one of the key limitations of being in a larger engineering firm like Dana and I both worked for a number of years. It’s the reality of the projects involved. A lot of the projects that the company did were with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so it was a lot of manual effort in terms of fixing shapefile lines, fixing GIS, and minute details. From the perspective of science, as we remember it from undergrad or grad school, it’s not reminiscent of that. The engineering and scientific fields, I think in general, in the private sector have unfortunately limited time to make pure discovery, and I think that is what led us to try our own thing. I feel like I’ve had more brainstorming sessions and open thoughts than I did previously when working the normal 40-hour workweek. To go along with that, being able to do this on our own, we can control the pace. Sometimes, the corporate pace is very quick. We need something turned around, so you’re just looking for an immediate solution rather than looking for a long-term solution, a creative solution, or even fixing inefficiencies in something that you see. Being able to pick and choose where you want to put your time and effort without thinking about overhead all the time has been freeing creatively. With that creative freeing, I feel like that’s a common cause of people feeling disengaged from their jobs. There’s no creativity and there’s someone else telling them what to do. Out of curiosity, do you have investors or other people at this point that you have to answer to that may have a little bit of input into your timelines? Unfortunately, no. We don’t have any plants about that at the moment, but sometimes, depending on how things evolve, you may need to bring people in if you want to stay afloat. We don’t have any vision of bringing outside people in at this time. If it comes down to the fact where we have to bring in somebody else to stay afloat, then we’ll have to have a critical conversation about that. One of the things that are motivating a lot of people, especially in our Millennial generation, is this desire for autonomy. I’m not saying that older generations didn’t want autonomy. Seeing it as a possibility, I think more in previous generations wasn’t there. What has this autonomy allowed you to do both in your consulting business as well as in life in general? I think in terms of the practical stuff that people feel day-to-day, we have two projects that we’re working on as opposed to when we were, or at least for me personally when I was working for the engineering firm. I probably had anywhere from 4 to 8 things that I would have to put on my timesheet every week. Let’s say we’re working 40 hours here and there. If you divide those 40 hours by 8 versus by 2, that’s a humongous difference in the amount of commitment to one project. I think that’s one of the biggest upsides. We’re becoming specialized on these projects and allowing ourselves, as Dana said, to tweak inefficiencies that have always bugged us in the past as well as to throw out new ideas because the field is evolving rapidly. To go along with that, I’ve found it easier to say no, because we’re so highly specific in what we do and what we want to go after. I don’t feel like I’m letting anyone down. One of the best benefits is you get to set your own hours and choose your workload, and that’s something that we were both on the same page with. We have other interests outside of our 9:00 to 5:00 job, 40 hours a week. Sometimes, there are more hours that need to be put in, and sometimes, there are less. It’s a much more natural balance of reading the room and what needs to get done. Exiting Gracefully: The engineering and scientific fields, in general, in the private sector, have unfortunately limited time to do pure discovery. It’s also fantastic, first of all, that you found a way to not feel that guilt about saying no and to recognize that’s better for everyone. I think I would love for my audience to take that point out of this discussion and say, “Sometimes, you have to put that saying no into context.” Do you also feel the quality of the service you give to your customers? Is it much better because you’re doing the amount of projects that are going to work out best for everybody? Yeah. We have been able to put more into our projects. With that, when you have the ability to have a little bit more time to spend on a project, you find these creative ideas, and being able to have this company on our own, we can go through and execute those ideas. We don’t have to go up a chain of command to give a little something extra to our clients, which is what we pride ourselves on. It’s constantly finding improvements and then implementing them that our client’s benefit. I need to ask this. Do you ever have any friction as cofounders when you have differences in how to serve a client or which client is a good idea? Fortunately, I would say we have been sailing smoothly so far. We’re only a year in, so in the future, there could be things that will arise, for sure. I think the beauty of what we have going on here is that we complement each other very well, which is a bigger topic. If you’re going to do this stuff and if you’re going to go out on your own, it’s hard to do it by yourself or with somebody that you might not get along with when you have to be on the phone with them all the time. That’s 40 hours a week, potentially. So far, I think we’re doing well, but I’m not going to say that’s going to last indefinitely because there might be a hiccup here and there, but I think we’re optimistic. I think it helped that our relationship started as colleagues first. For background, all three of us go storm chasing together. Steven was my connection to Dmitry, initially, so having that colleague and then friendship level, and then back to a colleague has been very helpful. We understand how each other operate and we’re very different, which so far has been a huge asset, but we’ll likely have differences and priorities later on. There’s an interesting backstory of when the company came together. Dana and I, over the last couple of years, were at an engineering firm. I started there first, and then she was brought on later....