Hi folks! Glad you’ve found your way to our page. Here’s a little background on my engineering journey and what led me to found Integrative Engineers.
Why consulting?
I started consulting shortly after moving to Miami. I had spent half a decade playing the corporate game as most engineers are trained to do through university. After four promotions within two years at a Fortune 500 subsidiary I realized my trajectory was stagnating. When you’re the youngest senior manager in the history of a 50-year-old company, the approvals for promotion become harder to achieve. I knew I was capable of much more and didn’t want to be spending so much of my time playing politics just to get ahead. I want to be an engineer after all, a professional problem-solver!
Moving to Miami
I moved to Miami in 2016 as I saw it was a land of fertile soil, ripe for new industries and new professional opportunities. I wasn’t sure if this bet would pay off but by the time 2020 and that crazy pandemic rolled around, Miami became a hotspot of national acclaim. The challenge for me as an industrial engineer is that there wasn’t the allure of large companies and well-established industries here. Most headquarters were simply Latin America-focused branches and tech companies were nearly non-existent. I worked with a few different companies up to 2020, from luxury salon products to medical technology companies, but once the lockdowns were in full force and the resulting supply chain issues started to manifest, I saw my opportunity! I could leverage the work-from-home environment to reach companies beyond South Florida and be a full-time consultant.
My Client Successes
I’ve greatly enjoyed living in the amazing region and still being able to help businesses large and small across the country to grow and optimize. Throughout my career, my focus has been on identifying key bottlenecks in processes, creating simple systems to overcome these barriers, and developing software solutions to automate the processes as much as possible. I founded my consulting company in 2018 and ultimately named it Integrative Engineers LLC. If you’ll indulge me for a paragraph, I’ll explain why this name resonated with me.
What does Integrative even mean?
Before my move to Miami, I had been so focused on my career and climbing the corporate ladder that I let my health get away from me. I hit my peak of 240 lbs right before my corporate promotion. After getting relocated to Florida I knew I needed to address my health. I was now in a land of constant summer with fresh produce all around. No excuses! Right?! But I had no idea where to start. I did what most are trained to do: TRAIN! I lifted every day, ran four miles every couple of days, and enjoyed my long daily walks to train my new puppy, a German Shepherd whom I named Kaizen to reiterate my goal of constant and continuous improvement. But alas, I was lucky if I shed all of 5 lbs. So, I did what any good engineer does, if you want to master something, you must study it and understand its operations. This journey is worthy of another post altogether, but to hit the highlights, I read dozens of books, listened to a myriad of podcasts, and approached every new material with a blank slate, no preconceived notions of truth. And as I relearned basic biology and nutrition, I built upon each realization until I had a new view of health and medicine. I lost a total of 90 lbs and it actually came off quick and easy once I knew what I was doing and developed the daily processes to execute. Through my research, I became enamored by the approach of integrative medicine; looking at the body in totality and how each function integrates with another. This approach attempts to avoid the issues with symptomatic care (only treating symptoms instead of underlying causes) by looking at how the body operates in totality and how each function affects another. Now, with a boost of self-confidence from my weight loss, I made the move to Miami eager to continue my journey.
Integrating Business Operations
With this new concept of integrative approaches, I realized that’s exactly what most companies need. Many of the surface-level problems a business faces are rooted in more fundamental issues. Unless you follow the problem from the symptom down to the root cause, you will only address one issue just to have another one pop up in its place. Do you ever feel like you’re just putting out fires in your job? This is why that happens. No one thinks to remove the fuel burning the flames, they just want to throw a bucket of water on it every couple of weeks. So Integrative Engineers was born!
Our Mission and Focus
At Integrative Engineers, our mission is to “create internal alignment in your business. From optimizing operations to connecting your culture.” What I’ve found with many of the clients I’ve worked with is that you can put the best systems in place and optimize your operations in and out, but if you lack a strong vision for your employees and allow interpersonal problems to fester you will never get ahead. That’s why I’ve dedicated my mission to not only applying the industrial engineering approaches to improve operations but to also ensure there is proper alignment within the organization. Ultimately the goal is to ensure your employees are engaged and eager to work each day to see your company’s vision manifest.
I’ll go deeper into the specific strategies I employ to ensure you have organization clarity and alignment in future posts so be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned. I’ll also be sharing some of the specific systems and software I’ve developed to create proper resource planning within your company. If you’re ready to grow your business and looking for guidance setup a call for a free consultation today.
Thanks,
Grayson Boone