Prior to joining Simpson Strong-Tie in March of 2023, I worked as a consulting structural engineer for 13 years. My background in consulting includes many different project types and sectors, and it’s been exciting to bring that experience to Simpson Strong-Tie to help find solutions for our customers and engineers who specify our products.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet many of my coworkers over the last year through our various meetings and summits. From our sales team to engineering to our administration and senior leadership teams, I’ve been impressed with the level of experience in the construction industry many of my colleagues have.

To me, all that experience means that we as a company have a large breadth of knowledge to draw from as we develop and find solutions for our customers’ problems. Sometimes, as those in the industry know from their day-to-day problem-solving, finding a solution requires being innovative. It requires curiosity and, sometimes, challenging the status quo. In fact, one of Simpson Strong-Tie’s nine Company Values is Risk-Taking Innovation (Value #7).

Sometimes the path to an answer is straightforward, and we can easily recommend a post base or hanger that is appropriate for the situation. At other times, the path may be more circuitous, with various stops along the way, checking in with product engineering or reaching out to other engineers in the company who have experience in the area about which I need more information.

Occasionally, the result of these winding roads is a new or innovative solution that we can suggest to our customers. These solutions may not be shown in our catalog or on our website, but based on the testing that we’ve done, or the testing that we can do, we can give recommendations to the engineer that they can put into practice with their engineering judgment.

Recently, I have been involved with a project involving TimberBLDR, a mass timber contracting company, and Matt Risinger from Risinger Build and The Build Show. The project, a large mass timber home constructed using mass plywood panel (MPP) beams, columns and wall sheathing, has presented some unique opportunities to use our products (like our ACBH™ Concealed Beam Hanger).

Because mass plywood panels are an emerging material within the mass timber space, especially in residential construction, our engineering team used our collective experience and the knowledge gained from previous testing of engineered wood products to present product options to the project team for their consideration. In short, it was an opportunity for us to think outside-the-box and be innovative!