My story, and the birth of Elevation Engineering
I started out in architecture in college and actually switched over to engineering because I enjoyed the technical side of the industry. I always had a passion for residential and never knew how the two, residential and engineering were going to marry. Typically you don’t need a structural engineer involved when you’re doing residencies.
The first time I came to the Smoky Mountains, I was actually on a weekend trip with some of my college friends. It was our last weekend together and we were going to do our last hurrah.
So we came here to Gatlinburg and we were driving around and I started seeing all these houses hanging off the side of mountains and thought Dang, you have to have a structural engineer for something like this. I actually went to the rental office to see, you know, who did their engineering and where they got it done and they said it was a local firm here who still exists. And so I went down there, printed out my resume, and ended up getting a job and started working here in the Smoky Mountains.
It was the first time I saw a structural engineering kind of really marry residential. And that was six years ago. My first job, as I said, was here. I was actually with Vision Engineering, who’s now CSC here in the local area, who’s primarily civil engineering started there and actually loved is probably my favorite job, even though I’ve bounced around quite a bit since then. And it was because it was residential. But when 2008 hit kind of saw the writing on the wall and thought, you know, I probably need to go somewhere else and do something else, and I ended up signing on with a firm that was based out of England and really enjoyed doing that was kind of in software sales actually, and started doing that and then went to that company, got bought out by a company based in Finland and then that company got bought out by a company based in Colorado. I went out there with my career and kind of worked from Idaho and on the West Coast for a while. And I’ve done everything now. I’ve done commercial, I’ve done industrial and heavy industrial petrochemical, and of everything that I’ve done, residential was always my favorite.
I was looking at potentially going out on my own and quite literally my old boss from here called me up and said, Hey, we got purchased by a national company that’s not going to allow us to do residential work anymore. And I don’t know you’re dealing with your life, but there’s a real need for a structural engineer that will do residential. I packed up all my stuff and I moved out here back in 2019 and started Elevation engineering and here we are.