In this episode, the discussion revolves around Geospatial consultancy – both as a business and as a career.
On the business side of things, the discussion focuses on how geospatial consultancies approach different markets and what they look for when hiring geospatial consultants.
On the other hand, if you are considering a job as a geospatial consultant, this podcast will help you understand what makes a good consultant and some of the most valuable skills that will drive your success.
A Quick Note about the Guest
Todd Slind, the VP of technology at Locana – a geospatial consultancy. Todd studied Civil engineering with an emphasis on transportation planning and traffic engineering. Towards his graduation, he received career advice from a graduate student advisor who pointed him towards GIS, which at the time (the early 90s) was an emerging technology with a promising future. Taking that advice, Todd completed a series of GIS courses and later on found a job as a GIS program analyst for a large municipal enterprise GIS program. He has worked in the geospatial field since then.
Will GIS Still Be Relevant In The Future?
With increased talks of democratizing GIS and making it available to everyone across all industries, one may wonder whether a career in GIS will still be a viable option in the future.
Clearly, a number of things will change and it is possible that a career in GIS may mean something different from what we know now.
But the bottom line is – GIS will continue to be relevant in the future because there is always going to be a need to understand new contexts and match very specific contextual data to the problems we are trying to solve.
Sure the space may shift from desktop GIS analysis to more of web GIS development, but a career in GIS being irrelevant? Very unlikely.
The Business of Geospatial Consulting
A geospatial consultancy may serve a variety of customers, but having flywheel customers that generate recurring revenue is very important for satisfying the core needs of the business. With the business running, a consultancy can then explore new business opportunities by making educated bets by looking at where the industries are going and the general world trend.
The next step is to figure out how to get attached to the opportunity stream – how to meet with the right people who are thought leaders in a particular industry. Collaborating with the right people unlocks new business, promotes growth, and keeps the consultancy’s activities relevant for the future.
Mature Markets Vs Growing Markets in Geospatial Consulting
In a broad sense, geospatial markets can be segmented into two – mature markets and growing markets. Mature markets often have established industry standards, which have been developed and adopted over time. This means that consultancies can build specialized software and tools on top of the already established platforms. In mature markets, the customer base is more sophisticated and well-informed; with a very solid understanding of the problem as well as a range of available solutions. Generally, they know what they need.
For growing markets, usually, the problems that need to be solved are typically still under discovery. The problems are less well-defined and the solutions often need to be bespoke.
Offering consulting services to a growing market follows a more conventional process beginning with the need to draw out the requirements of the customer, design a solution, and finally evaluate the appropriate technologies for solving the problem. But compared to mature markets, growing markets have a lot more creative space.
What Markets Should A Consultancy Address?
A consulting business always has to make decisions about where to focus its time and resources. Doing a market analysis will usually help to reveal how well along is a certain market on the adoption curve for the services that the consultancy offers.
To be on the leading edge, it is preferable to approach customers who have arrived at a point where they understand how a consultancy can address their problems. And when choosing which markets to serve, a consultancy should prioritize aligning the work they do to the company values. Working on things that are making a difference will help to bring a sense of satisfaction to people in the organization.
When Should A Consultancy Consider Build A Product Around Their Solution?
Before building a product, you have to know what a market needs. One way to do this is by offering bespoke services which will provide insight into what is working and what is not.
You will discover what it is that people are asking for again and again; and what promises you can make and keep. Coming from this point of experience and understanding, you can abstract the solution to a point where you can make it a product that could appeal to a broad set of customers.
What Do Consultancies Look For In Consultants?
If you are seeking a career in consulting, adapting to the consulting lifestyle early on matters a lot. In addition, you should cultivate creativity and be problem-solving oriented.
One of the top skills you need to develop is being able to interface with customers, draw out the specifics of their problems, and ideate how to solve the problem effectively and efficiently.
Another top skill is driving your own technical development. You should be able to effectively teach yourself new things in the industry.
Consulting businesses typically follow where the market is going and try to lead the market in that direction.
Self-directed learning is an invaluable skill that will help you stay on the leading edge as a consultant and make you a part of the next step forward toward where the technology is going.
Wrapping up the top three skills you should have as a consultant is the ability to make accurate levels of estimates of how long it may take to complete a task. The earlier in your career, you can acquire this skill, the more valuable you are going to be to a consultancy.
How Does A Consultancy Identify A Good Consultant?
Oftentimes, even before the formal interview, a consultancy’s hiring team would have identified the best candidates who can make good consultants during the screening process.
They usually pick this up from how a candidate describes their past projects and a show of ambitiousness in the steps they took along their journey.
The interview process is usually about assessing how creative a person is in answering the question: How is the candidate considering alternatives? Is the candidate thinking about how to make the best of the constraints and opportunities that are present? Is the candidate demonstrating a more mature way of approaching a problem? A candidate that scores positively on these questions is probably one that has developed the core qualities of a good consultant.
Recommend Podcast Episodes related to geospatial consultancy
Building a web-based mapping tool into a business
A Business Built on Open-Source GIS
Being A Graduate Geospatial Consultant
Hiring and Being Hired for Geospatial Jobs
Getting Where You Want To Go In Your Geospatial Career
In Conversation
From Transportation Planning to GIS
Daniel: Todd, welcome to the podcast. You’re the VP of Technology at Locana. Would you introduce yourself and let us know how you got involved in geospatial?
Todd: I’m based in Bellingham, Washington, in the northwest corner of the contiguous US. I came to GIS a bit as an afterthought. I was a graduate student studying civil engineering with an emphasis on transportation planning and traffic engineering, and as I neared graduation I asked my advisor what skills and tools I needed to be ready for the profession going forward. This was the early 90s, when GIS was transitioning to the PC and the desktop, and he said, you really need to check out this GIS thing — it’s kind of a fringe tool right now, but it’s going to be the core of the toolset for how we plan things. So I took a series of courses, and when I graduated there weren’t many jobs in transportation planning, so I was hired as a GIS programmer-analyst for a large municipal enterprise GIS program — one of the first around the country. I spent a few years helping build that enterprise GIS capability, then found a job in consulting where I could apply GIS to transportation.
Daniel: Does that advice still hold true today — learn GIS because it’s the future?
Todd: I do think so, probably more now than ever. We have a better understanding of how location, geography, and a sense of place factor into understanding problems and designing solutions. In the 30 years of my career it’s never been more true. It may shift — from being a desktop GIS analyst to being more of a web GIS developer configuring web-based tools — but there’s always going to be a need to match very specific contextual data to the problem set you’re considering or the users you’re trying to serve.
What Locana Does
Daniel: What does Locana do, and who do you work for?
Todd: We work for a variety of customers and focus on a few industries we understand well — it’s easier to work from a position of strength when you’re growing a consultancy business. We focus on three legs. One is infrastructure-based industry — utilities and governments. The second is commercial customers, including startup organizations looking to take a product to market who need a team and can plug us in as the geospatial component. The third, near and dear to me, is international development and humanitarian assistance, under the umbrella of what we call social benefit.
Mature Markets Versus Growing Markets
Daniel: Of those three customer groups, is one more mature than the others?
Todd: The utility space is very mature. When I think of a mature market, standards have emerged and been adopted, which allows specialized software and tools to be built on top of established platforms — so you get a lot of off-the-shelf features ready to plug into a task. There’s a robust consulting services ecosystem, robust competition, the beginning of commoditization, and a sophisticated, informed buying customer base. They know their problem, they know the variety of solutions available, and they can engage in a sophisticated way to negotiate how to get help.
Daniel: How do your approaches differ in the less mature markets?
Todd: In less mature markets things are less well defined — the problems are still under discovery and the solutions are most likely bespoke. We do a lot more custom development, using more of the building blocks of pure IT than proprietary platforms that have already solved the problem a thousand times. It’s much more consultative — you draw out the requirements, look at the universe of opportunities for which technologies to bring, and in an international development environment you also consider the constraints of the environment, like limited IT networks or bandwidth. There’s a lot more creative space, and with my personality that’s where I like to play — I’m less of a Lego builder and more of a blank-canvas watercolorist.
Deciding Where to Focus
Daniel: With limited resources, how do you decide where to spend your time — the known or the unknown?
Todd: We strike a balance. A lot of our core customer industries are very stable — if it’s a utility, people are always going to need their electricity — so it’s good for a consulting business to have a strong foundation in a stable industry. We call them flywheel customers, parts of the business that keep generating recurring revenue and a healthy baseline. Then we can place bets on emerging markets. We look at the mega-trends in the world — climate adaptation, 5G adoption, the great redistribution — figure out that those are location-intensive problems needing location intelligence, and then work out how to get attached to that opportunity stream and meet the thought leaders we can collaborate with.
Daniel: We say 80% of all data has a geo component — so how do you decide which industries to actually go after?
Todd: We’re pretty rigorous about building a business case. We look at the addressable market and how far along the adoption curve or hype cycle an industry is — we don’t want to be so far on the bleeding edge that we’re doing most of the bleeding; we want to be on the leading edge, where customers have arrived at the point where they understand how what we do addresses their problems. We also want to align the work to our company values, so we’re working on things that make a difference and that we can be proud of. There’s a strange uneven adoption of geospatial technology across industries — governments are well penetrated, but real estate, for example, is spatially intense yet hasn’t had a strong uptake in its core business processes.
From Bespoke Services to Products
Daniel: If you had to build a product for a mature market or a less mature market, which would you choose?
Todd: We’d be strongly biased towards a mature market. We typically approach product development by applying our learnings — when we decide to build a product, we’ve likely solved that problem three, four, or five times for customers, seen the pattern, and realised we can abstract it to a point where it could appeal to a broad set of customers. That said, I personally like to place small bets on emerging or underserved markets. So offering bespoke services into a market is a great way of doing market research — you learn what’s working, what people ask for again and again, and which promises you can keep — and then you can think about which services could be productised. We follow that same approach in emerging markets; climate adaptation is one area where we’re currently learning piece by piece.
Daniel: Would you bring expertise like climate adaptation in-house, or partner?
Todd: It’s a hybrid model. We partner with academic organisations, research-for-development organisations, and large international NGOs that have worked these problems for a long time. But we need intelligent interfaces to those people, so we keep some in-house subject matter expertise focused on the technical and data aspects. On big issues that require a PhD to really understand the complexities, we partner — it’s a matter of flanging into a partner organisation with the right language, taxonomies, and semantics so we can work together effectively.
What Makes a Good Consultant
Daniel: What does it take to make a great consultant — what skills and experience are you looking for?
Todd: Consulting is the area with the most creative space. You need curiosity, creativity, and to be problem-solving oriented and a self-starter — a bit of an autodidact, able to teach yourself new things effectively, because when you’re thrown a novel problem you can’t just look up the solution; you have to create something new. It requires patience too — you won’t always get the project work you want, and it won’t necessarily align with your unique interests immediately, so you need to stay with the journey. You’ll also need to interface with customers in a consultative manner, drawing out the specifics of their problem, so you need to be a bit gregarious. And you need an entrepreneurial spirit — to see opportunities in the morning newspaper or a conversation at a transit stop — because consulting is kind of an endless hustle.
Daniel: Is the ability to make accurate estimates an important skill?
Todd: Absolutely — it’s one of the top three skills a consultant should have. We try to cultivate it early by partnering a new team member with a more senior person; each does an independent estimate, then we talk through the whys and what-fors of how they came up with their numbers, which calibrates the youngster. That said, some senior people still need a bit of a fudge factor — they don’t think about all the meetings or the unanticipated rework inherent in software development. The earlier in your career you acquire estimation, the more value you’ll be to a consulting shop.
Daniel: Is there a particular background you look for?
Todd: I don’t think so. We have a diverse group — some from hardcore computing science backgrounds, some straight-ahead geographers, some immigrants to the technology field with liberal arts or business backgrounds. It’s more about how well people adapt to the consulting lifestyle — being adaptive, creative, able to understand the customer’s problems and work hard to make a solution happen.
Burnout, Innovation, and Learning on the Job
Daniel: How should a consultant who’s approaching burnout come to you with it?
Todd: We have a good culture of one-on-one conversations, so hopefully at the first inkling of dissatisfaction someone brings it up there. We keep attuned to people’s satisfaction with their assignments and rotate them when they’re approaching burnout — we have a fungibility within our team that lets people gravitate to work aligned with their interests. It comes back to patience, though; sometimes it can’t happen next Monday. And if someone has an innovative idea, I look for somebody who has taken the first step to make it real — a side project to prototype it or a short white paper. My role is to help people get voice to their ideas, and we’ll spin up initiatives on ideas that show promise.
Daniel: There’s a tension between being in your comfort zone, where you can estimate accurately, and learning on the job. How do you balance that?
Todd: As I’ve gotten more sure as a human being, I’ve gained a better appreciation of not just throwing people into the deep end. We make sure we have thorough, robust onboarding of team members to new projects, so everyone understands what they’re expected to do and what tools and technical bits they’ll work with — no gotchas. One challenge is that we’re driven by what’s best for the customer, so we’re a bit technology agnostic, which makes it hard to train people in advance for a specific technology. As a consultant you have to own your own technical development, because we’re following where the market is going and trying to lead it — we’re not going to sit on our laurels as a static tech shop.
Daniel: When do you know you’ve got a consultant who’s going to thrive?
Todd: First, to be clear, we’re not a training-free environment — we have core consulting skills training around leadership, communication, and running meetings, plus curated technology courses. But to answer your question, I’m more on the intuitive side — I usually have an inkling after the screening call, even before a formal interview. It’s often revealed through how someone describes their capstone project, how ambitious it was, or some personal initiative — “I did this thing and it created all this value.” Then in the interview it’s about how creative the person gets in answering a question — are they considering alternatives, thinking about budget constraints or existing things they can leverage — demonstrating that more mature way of approaching a problem.
Daniel: Where can people go to reach out to you or Locana?
Todd: I’m on Twitter and on LinkedIn as Todd Slind, with my connections open. We have fairly up-to-date postings on our website, locana.co — and sometimes we have positions in the pipeline without a description posted yet, so it’s good to reach out even if you don’t see something that interests you.
