ACCESS ENGINEERING
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA
Access Engineering is a longstanding structural engineering consultancy, known for delivering exceptional services on projects throughout British and Columbia and Alberta. Since forming in 1983 as a mom-and-pop shop, they have grown and evolved significantly over the years – particularly in the years since 2017, when Bruce Johnston purchased the company and began a campaign of modernization. “When I got here, the company had a great reputation, it was known for providing a great service, but it was small and a bit behind the times in terms of technology,” Bruce recalls. Bruce is a seasoned professional engineer and Red Seal carpenter with over 15 years of industry experience, including several years with PCL Builders. After acquiring Access Engineering, he spearheaded the development of a proprietary enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to streamline project management, invoicing, and compliance. That software was ultimately called ‘Stackd’ and the impact has been undeniable. Using Stackd, Access Engineering has improved their efficiency, reduced their administrative burdens, and enhanced their financial tracking – and the result has been “pretty significant growth,” Bruce says, both in terms of project size and employee count. After proving the value of the software, Access Engineering sold Stackd’s intellectual property to DesignTIME Solutions Inc. to enable further development and commercialization. DesignTIME was incorporated in June 2024 and Bruce is the CEO, though he’s also still a principal of Access Engineering – he splits his time between the two positions, and two other partners have taken ACCESS ENGINEERING
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA
over managing partner roles in Prince George and Edmonton. Stackd is now available as an integrated subscription-based software solution for other engineering firms, but it was originally created solely with the goal of facilitating the growth of Access Engineering. The idea for it came from one of the first employees Bruce hired after taking over. “He said if you really want to grow this company, if you’re really an entrepreneur, you need an ERP,” Bruce recalls. “And I said ‘That sounds great, but how do you go about that?’ He said ‘Well, first you need to hire a software developer.’” That employee had a connection with a developer who attended a technical college in Prince George but was living in Brazil. Bruce reached out to him to ask some questions and learned he was interested in moving back to Canada. Access Engineering sponsored his work visa and he came over and started developing the system architecture. Previously, Bruce says Access Engineering had a pretty “archaic” way of documenting things. “We had a blue blinder on the front counter where we would take a piece of paper out of a photocopied pile of papers and write our new project information so that the bookkeeper could put the project in the accounting software and track the invoices,” he explains. “It was really stumble-y and old school. So the first thing we needed to do was put together a project list and incorporate a client and contact list.” Their software developer was able to put together a piece of software with that functionality. From there, they kept refining the software, building new modules and adding new functionality. Eventually, they had a proprietary system that they owned and worked really well for them. They believed the system could also work well for other companies, so they branded the system Stackd and formed DesignTIME Solutions in order to commercialize it. ACCESS ENGINEERING
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA
ACCESS ENGINEERING Saving time For engineering companies, Bruce believes the biggest appeal of Stackd is the time it saves – and in the field of consulting engineering, time is money. The Association of Consulting Engineering Companies—Canada sets standard recommended rates that vary depending on the classification of the service, but they start at $150 an hour and can get as high as $400 an hour. “So if you’re an engineering company, the time of the experienced key personnel in your organization is very valuable,” he says. “But often those people are plagued with the administrative burden of creating fee proposals and reviewing formal documentation before it goes out.” In creating and refining Stackd, they focused on creating tools that would help ease those burdens, which make it simpler and easier to issue repetitive types of documentation, such as change management
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA documents or assessment reports or risk assessments. They also “baked in” a lot of compliance requirements that are mandated by provincial regulators. “Every time you start a new project, you create a risk assessment, and there’s a personnel profile based on who is doing the risk assessment or the engineer of record for the project,” Bruce explains. “And then there’s a project specific risk assessment component that you fill out, and you can template those. So, if you’re doing anything repetitive, any type of job that’s similar, you can save it as a template. And that’s really widespread across the project module. “So if you’re writing a fee proposals for a four-story wood frame building with a concrete podium, you would write a fee proposal for that size of building – and there’s probably lots of those types of buildings that you’re going to do over the next five year, so you save it as a template,” he elaborates. “Then the next one that you do, you’re importing that as a template. We’ve tried to and rinse and repeat that concept throughout the document generation side of things.” “The goal is just to save time,” he continues. “And even if you just save 15 minutes a day, that time can be used to generate an additional approximately $10,000 a year, per person.” Those time savings, and that additional revenue, is not just hypothetical – Access Engineering has been using Stackd and has seen the results. “In our organization, we’re saving a lot more time than 15 minutes a day,” Bruce says. “That’s
ACCESS ENGINEERING really benefited us. We’ve increased our revenue and we’ve been able to invest more time into continuing professional development. It’s been a game changer.” So far, the response from prospective clients has been very positive. Bruce and his team at DesignTIME have given a lot of demonstrations to contacts and have had a lot of meetings and productive conversations. Bruce has also learned a lot about sales in a short time. “First you have to impress somebody with what you have,” he says. “Then you’ve got to get them to admit that what they’re doing now maybe isn’t as efficient as it could be. Then you have to convince them that the onboarding process is well-defined and that it’s going to be worth it for them to roll the dice. I’m learning how to have those conversations delicately and graduate leads through the pipeline. That’s been going really well.” As far as next steps are concerned, Bruce says DesignTIME has set clear and achievable goals. In 2025, they are focused on obtaining 10 clients. In 2026, they aim to grow that number to 30. By the end of 2027, their goal is to grow that number again to 100. Initially, Stackd was a discipline-specific ERP for structural engineers, like Access Engineering, but they’ve already taken on electrical and mechanical engineering clients and in the longterm Bruce believes they could take on much more. He envisions building out Stackd to suit all engineering disciplines. And once they have incorporated the functionality needed for those other disciplines, the goal will be to package it all into a multidisciplinary ERP and go after a larger client base.
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA “So there is a fairly clear roadmap,” Bruce says. “If we can prove viability and experience success with structural engineering firms in Canada, we can grow our target market by rounding out the product to suit the other disciplines, and then we can double it again by going multidisciplinary and going after larger fish, so to speak.” Bruce admits that he might not be the right person to lead that charge in the long term, but as long as they are pursuing discipline specific engineering firms, he believes he’s the right person for the job, as he has such a deep understanding of the building design industry. Once they start really branching out, however, he anticipates reevaluating the company’s executive structure. “Maybe we’ll bring on somebody from the SaaS industry with a bit more experience navigating an intense growth pace,” he says. “I mean, these things can snowball quickly, and when it starts to move fast we want to have the right people in place.” That’s not to say Bruce doesn’t have experience managing growth. Over at Access Engineering, the company has grown at a rapid pace in recent years. When Bruce arrived, he was employee number four and they mostly took on small projects. Today, the company employs 18 people spread between two offices, one in Prince George and another in Edmonton, Alberta, and they regularly take on projects in the $50 million-plus range in a wide variety of sectors. “The story of Access Engineering is interesting, because it started with one person, and he did a lot of small projects over the course of 30 years,” Bruce says. “And then I came on board and we started to build out the team. And then there was just this natural progression of undertaking larger and larger projects and hiring specialists
ACCESS ENGINEERING in material disciplines like mass timber, concrete, and structural steel. We’ve continually expanded our repertoire in terms of our capacity and the types of projects we do.” As their scope of work has evolved, Access Engineering has also focused on forming strong ties with industry leading contractors. Bruce believes the strength of those partnerships – in combination with the development of their ERP system – has played a key role in the rapid growth of the company. As examples, Access works closely with IDL Projects, Datoff Bros. Construction, PRD Construction, Marmot Builders, and several other proven and experienced general contractors based in Prince George. Datoff Bros., for instance, is a company with a solid reputation based on quality work, versatile project capabilities, and responsiveness to client needs. Much like Access Engineering, they are an experienced company with a well-defined set of management systems and administrative procedures, and that mix of experience and professionalism enables them to complete projects on time, on budget, and to the satisfaction of clients. Working closely with likeminded partners of that calibre, Access Engineering aims to continue growing and taking on larger projects, for which they definitely have the capacity. According to Bruce, “we can basically handle any building of any material up to six storeys in height – which is 98 per cent of the buildings in Canada.” Access Engineering also hopes to continue adding staff and expanding geographically, Bruce concludes. He says “we’re not done growing by any stretch – the Access Engineering story is far from over.”
THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA For more on Access Engineering, their story, their services, and the work they do – and to get in touch with Bruce and other members of their growing team – visit https://accesseng.ca/ And for more on Stackd – including how it works, key features, and pricing – visit https://www.stackdsolutions.ca/
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