Psomas

Aggressive but sensible
growth over the years

Throughout its existence, Psomas has been known mostly for its land surveying expertise. “I feel we’re one of the strongest surveying firms in the country,” says CEO Blake Murillo, P.E. “But that surveying service provides support to our design services in the land development, water and wastewater, and transportation businesses. So we’re far from just a surveying company.”

Indeed, Psomas has grown to become a full-fledged engineering firm as well. With headquarters in Los Angeles, they’ve expanded from a one-office firm to one with 850 employees in 20 offices in California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Mexico.

But such aggressive growth has actually been planned and has come for a variety of reasons. Murillo says they grow to provide continued opportunities for employees and to diversify across their specialties so they’re not so dependent on surveying and land development. Along the way, they’ve gotten into sustainability and green building as a natural outgrowth.

George Psomas started the firm as a surveying company in 1946 after World War II. It remained a surveying firm covering the greater Los Angeles area through the 1940s and 1950s. Engineering work came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they got more into that when George’s son Tim graduated from Loyola Marymount in 1964 with a civil engineering degree and joined the firm soon after. They worked mostly for private clients doing site work, land development, and subdivisions.

The company started growing in the early to mid 1970s and getting more into public work in the early 1980s. With a recession hitting then, company officials thought it wiser to become more diversified and balanced. They started doing water projects for local governments and transportation projects for local and state governments in the 1990s. They tried to create a 50/50 balance of public and private work and have maintained that.

Tim Psomas ran the company until 2002, when Murillo took over as CEO and Jacob Lipa, P.E. took over as president, “so we’re the third generation,” as Murillo calls it. Tim Psomas remains as chairman of the board.

Diversity of Projects
Several of Psomas’ projects typify what the firm is about today. The Furnace Creek Water System In Death Valley National Park, California involved replacing an existing water supply that was unreliable, subject to failure, and nearing the end of its useful life. When the system was installed in the 1970s, conservation of water and biological resources were not a priority. Psomas designed a new potable and non-potable water supply, distribution, and treatment system. A reverse osmosis treatment system reduces levels of arsenic and fluoride in the potable water. Psomas has provided engineering services to more than 40 national parks in California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and Saipan, mostly involving upgrading water and wastewater systems.

A project for the Pedley Commuter Rail and Transit Station in Riverside, California had Psomas providing project management, civil engineering, and surveying services. This included urban planning and site design as well as design of a Metrolink platform, shelters, and amenities.

In a unique project involving natural resources, Psomas has teamed with California State University Fullerton and San Bernardino County in the Santa Ana River Woolly Star Management Plan Implementation in San Bernardino County, California. Since 1995, they have worked to implement a multi-year management and protection plan for the flower in its only known habitat, the Santa Ana River Wash. The team is studying the life history, demography, and recovery potential of the Woolly Star. Psomas is providing overall project management and GIS (geographic information systems) and GPS (Global Positioning System) mapping for hydrology and habitats as well as serving as the interface between academics and regulatory agencies.

Psomas has grown since the 1970s by adding new locations, with the first one coming in Orange County. They continued to add offices throughout California and then started to expand out of state in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. They’ve chosen to focus on nine western states, including the three west-coast states and through the Sun Belt as far as Texas. Their plan works out to 15 percent growth a year, with Murillo describing it as “a combination of organic growth and mergers and acquisitions growth with the hope that it would be about 50/50. We’ve ended up hiring half the growth, and the other half comes through merging with good companies, primarily in new locations.”

Murillo says they have three reasons for growing. “We’re trying to grow our water business and transportation to provide a nice diversity across the three markets and balance our portfolio.” Second, it allows them to go after larger, more challenging and fun projects, as many project owners want a well-rounded, diversified company that can do everything they need.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Psomas’ leaders want people who work there to always see a career path for themselves, growing into new positions and responsibilities. “We’ve created a lot of opportunities for people to move from office to office and take on new responsibilities,” Murillo explains. “When I started with the company, there were 25 people, so I’ve always had an opportunity, and we’d like to make sure other people have that kind of opportunity.” As a transplant from the San Francisco Bay area, Murillo started there in 1976 with a B.S. in civil engineering and a master’s in water resources.

Strong on Sustainability
With the public recognizing global warming issues, Psomas has seen interest in sustainability and green building grow. “One of the parts of our mission statement involves balancing the natural and built environments,” Murillo says. “We try to coach and help clients understand that, and we try to work with overseers and stewards of the environment to figure out how there can be a win-win.”

Murillo points to one area where they’ve made progress in this. “Most of the things that we’ve been able to help with in terms of sustainability have been around water and managing stormwater. How do you manage stormwater on site? When it rains, how do you minimize the increase in runoff? How do you clean it up? Before, it used to be a field, and now it’s going to be much more impervious surfaces, so how do you make sure the pollutants are removed before they go offsite? We’ve been able to do that pretty effectively.” But he sees one area that hasn’t done as well as expected. “One thing I don’t think has taken hold as much as I would’ve thought is things like porous pavement, where instead of capturing the runoff and then treating it, you’re minimizing the runoff by letting it infiltrate. There’s still hope, and I expect it will do better.”

Not surprisingly, Psomas has embraced the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council, Murillo says. “When LEED came out, we decided it could help us demonstrate that we’re trying to practice what we preach.” The firm started getting its people accredited, with Murillo one of the first ones a couple of years ago. They offer annual training programs in LEED. “Our goal is to keep getting more and more of our technical staff LEED accredited.”

Carrying it a step further, Psomas has also embraced the new LEED for Neighborhood Development (ND) standard. Murillo serves on the corresponding committee for this standard, which measures sustainable communities by incorporating LEED principles on a project-wide basis. This focuses greater attention on site-wide planning and design, incorporating smart growth and new urbanism into the planning of residential and mixed-use developments.

One of Psomas’ two LEED ND pilot projects, Sahuarita is an eight-acre infill parcel on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. The proposed development of 54 homes will showcase the benefits of building within existing development to conserve natural resources and maximize existing infrastructure. The neighborhood design will provide walkable streets, a bicycle network, and internal connections to encourage physical activity, social interaction, and optimized land use.  Existing wetlands will be conserved as a natural amenity.

This represents just one aspect of the strategic growth Psomas has followed for many decades now. Surveying still serves as their foundation, but this provides ample proof they have flourished as an engineering firm as well.

Snapshot

Company:
Psomas

Type:
Civil engineering consulting firm

Location:
Headquarters in Los Angeles, California with offices also in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Mexico

Website:
www.psomas.com

Types of engineers they use: Civil and environmental

Outlook for hiring engineers: “I can’t even remember how long ago it was that we weren’t in a hiring mode,” says CEO Blake Murillo, P.E. They see an overall engineer shortage and say it will only get worse. While the demand has gone down over the past year. “There is still a demand for engineers, and we have a number of openings today.“ They have 30 to 40 openings posted on their website now; “I know a year and a half ago, we had 120. We had over 100 openings almost constantly. We could’ve done more work if we had more people. We had to turn a lot of work down. That has subsided because a lot of the work demand has subsided, primarily on the land development side.”

What they look for in engineers: “Generally, we still need good, experienced project managers. Those people with seven to 15 years of experience are still very challenging to find,” Murillo says. “Right now, we’re looking for anybody in the stormwater arena that really understands stormwater quality, which is a growing and evolving field. Not a lot of people out there really understand it technically and scientifically very well. If a few of those people walked in, we’d love to have them.” He continues, “We hire entry level as well. Obviously, from the experience side, you’re looking for different things. This is very much a collaborative process, so you need to be able to fit in. We have a culture here at Psomas that when somebody comes into the company, they’re welcomed to a team.”

Contact for submitting resumes:
Marcy Russell

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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