Robby Vogel, Director of Structural Engineering

In this episode of the WGI Unleashed Podcast, hosts Dan and Katie head over to our Austin office to sit down with Robby Vogel, PE, Director of Structural Engineering in our Buildings group! Robby has been selling since he was 13. Back then he'd call customers at his dad's mechanic shop to tell them their car was ready, then offer to detail it if they could wait a few more hours. The pitch has gotten bigger since, and so have the stakes, but one pattern has held for his whole career. Almost every door he walked through opened because he knew somebody, or somebody knew his mom. Seguin, Texas: Home of the Fighting Matadors Robby grew up in Seguin, a small town between San Antonio and Austin that sits on the Guadalupe River and takes its name from Texas Revolution hero Juan Seguín. In a town where everybody knew everybody, he couldn't get away with much, although he jokes that going to school with the district attorney's daughter and the judge's sons certainly didn't hurt. The building bug showed up early in Legos, Lincoln Logs, and a lot of sketching. It grew in high school, where he took three drafting classes from a retired architect, and on visits to his mom's office, where he watched the engineers at a tractor-products company trade their drafting boards for AutoCAD. By his own account, the cool factor had him hooked. Architecture was the original plan, but the University of Texas's architecture school turned him down. A friend's dad, an architect himself, had already suggested engineering, since Robby was tutoring his daughter in math at the time. Robby had listed architectural engineering as his fallback, and he got into a program he'll tell you was ranked number one in the world at the time. As Plan Bs go, it worked out pretty well.... The Long Road to Structural Austin didn't have many big firms offering internships back then, and the firms in Dallas and Houston were barely paying interns, so Robby spent his summers bartending and working at a pharmacy. None of it taught him engineering, but it did teach him how to read people and how to give someone the benefit of the doubt on a bad day, and he considers that part of the job now. His first job out of school was with a general contractor in Dallas. On his first day there, he mentioned to the CEO that he'd done a little research and learned that the CEO's wife and Robby's mom had gone to school together in Seguin. The CEO went and called his wife on the spot. The GC side taught Robby how buildings actually go together. Eventually, though, an engineer his mom worked with asked him why he'd gone to school in the first place. The honest answer was that he wanted to be a professional engineer, so he went job hunting with no design experience and made one firm a pitch. They could hire him now and mentor him their way, or they could pay a lot more for him later, once he'd figured it out somewhere else. The firm took the deal, and even with the pay cut, Robby was soon designing roughly two Home Depots a week. When the market crashed in 2008, Robby was laid off a week before his wedding. A connection from his bartending days led him to Page Southerland Page in Dallas, where he worked on federal and healthcare projects. He wanted to lead a team, though, so when a friend recruited him to run structural at a smaller education-focused firm in Plano, he took it. He spent the next decade there designing everything bond dollars could buy, from classroom additions to stadiums and natatoriums, and the firm eventually became part of Stantec. A Well-Timed Phone Call What Robby wanted next was real ownership, a seat where he could help shape where a company was headed. On the very day he decided to start looking, WGI's Talent Acquisition Specialist called him about a market leader role in Dallas. He told her he couldn't make that work from Austin and asked her to let him know if a director position ever opened up, and a week later she was calling back. One of his first conversations was with Shad, the Buildings director at the time, and the two quickly realized that Robby is living Shad's life about ten years behind. They're both UT architectural engineering grads who married UT communications grads, and both are raising two daughters. The only thing missing, Robby says, is that he never played football. The Work: Revit, Responsibility, and a Little Spark When Shad pitched the role, he described an experienced structural team that did great work and just needed a spark, and Robby has treated that as his job description ever since. He's responsible for the team's financial health and growth. Sales run through him, and so does holding the team accountable, himself included. A few months after he started, someone on the civil team asked him what exactly he did. Robby explained that structural decisions ultimately land on him, and the reply was, "Oh, so you're somebody important." He'd rather you didn't put it that way. He still gets into Revit and runs calcs himself, which occasionally gets him in trouble, because, as he puts it, "I will never ask anybody to do something I won't do myself." He's also the one who brought WGI's first education projects to Texas. When Dave and Greg recognized that during a company town hall, his daughters happened to be listening at home and turned to ask him, "Did they just say your name?" Life Outside the Office With two daughters, ages 11 and 9, who dance and swim competitively, Robby calls himself a professional fan, the kind who supports from the stands and leaves the coaching to someone else. He also keeps a whiskey collection that has become more of a trophy case than a bar. His brother-in-law knows the house rule: any bottle on the countertop is fair game. Robby knows exactly which bottle he's leaving out when he hears the brother-in-law is coming over. His hidden talent is getting stains out of clothes. He handles all the laundry at home, by his own account because he's good at it. That streak goes back to his car-detailing days, when he spent summers washing his mom's coworkers' cars in the driveway for about $100 a day.... Tune In Robby closed the episode with an open invitation. Anyone questioning whether they picked the right path into engineering or architecture should reach out, because he's been there and would love to talk it through. It's a fitting offer from someone whose own career was shaped by the people who picked up the phone for him. Stick around for two truths and a lie, too, where Dan and Katie's losing streak continues. Tune into this episode of WGI Unleashed on your favorite podcast platform, and stay tuned for more conversations with the people, projects, and culture that define WGI! Visit your favorite podcast app now and subscribe to WGI Unleashed to receive alerts every time a new episode drops – You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.