MEMBER PROFILE Dennis Boehm is a modest man. According to him, he was either born “lucky or has talked to the right people,” in his career. Boehm, vice president, Central Region, at Hayward Baker, says that every career move offered a unique challenge, and added to his portfolio of skills. Bob Rubright, managing director, North America of Keller U.S.A, which owns Hayward Baker, speaks of Boehm as a creative engineer, a rare species, he says, noting that these qualities don’t often exist in the same individual. He also says that Boehm is a man “not afraid of anything.” Jim Henry, retired from Hayward Baker and now with a Harza company, expands, calling Boehm “courageous” in his approach to new technologies, Boehm, says Henry, “embraces them and likes to step out into the unknown.” Accolades abound in comments by others. Boehm has worked for the firm for about 23 years and has impressed a lot of people along the way. Boehm was born in Pasadena, Texas, and his decision to become an engineer began in high school, he says, where he hung around with other “nerds,” students who were good at science and math, played chess and took acceler- ated courses. He decided engineering would be a good profession, and applied only to Texas A&M. There he focused initially on nuclear engineering, with a bit of a push from his dad, who envisioned a future with nuclear plants “everywhere.” Boehm worked in a coop summer program between his freshman and sophomore years in college and one day he noticed a man doing a density test, and asked what kind of engineers his firm hired. The answer was civil engineers. On the basis of this inquiry and some research, Boehm switched his curriculum. That next year he started working for Bill Berger of Berger Material Engineers, Inc. in Bryan, Texas, thinking the job would gain him valuable office and field experience in civil engineering. Boehm credits Berger with influencing him to focus on geotechnical engineering — challenging him to “work hard, learn more and study more.” Dennis Boehm: Creative, Courageous, and “Lucky” Boehm took that advice to heart. He graduated with op- tions in Geotechnical and Struc- tural Engineering within the civil engineering program. This took four and a half years, and Boehm married his high school girlfriend shortly after they graduated from college. “Cool” Offer At this juncture, Boehm was offered a “cool” job with a JV firm called Prescon and he worked on two miles of the segmental bridge highway project in San Antonio, where Boehm and his wife moved. His main responsibility was to develop the high early strength concrete mix that worked best for the aggressive construction cycle of the precast bridge segments. Other duties included the design and construction of pile supported foundations necessary to support the massive formwork and the prestressing frames necessary for the precast segment construction. He learned a lot about concrete, foundations and also found that he really liked construction. Next Boehm worked for a firm called Precon, which also focused on precast elements, mainly for parking garages and high-rise buildings. His boss was an “awesome structural engineer,” but not such a great business man, he says. Precon had promoted him to the position of Northeast manager, and he was transferred to the Washington, D.C. area. After about 18 months he got a call saying there was no money to pay the workers and suppliers. Boehm had learned a good deal about the structural design of concrete and the use of prestressing to make designs more effective, but decided it was time to move on. At this point Boehm saw an ad for Hayward Baker, which listed all their offices, including Houston. Boehm and his family always hoped to return to Texas, so he applied for the job. He got the job and started out in the firm’s Odenton, Md., office. Approximately a year after being hired, there was an opening down south. Bob Rubright, then Boehm’s boss in Odenton, remembers that decision. The firm wanted to expand its Texas business and create an office in the Houston area. Someone said why not send Boehm — he’s a Texan. Boehm’s departure was Rubright’s loss, he says. Boehm is “Texas Large,” according to Rubright, an indefinable but obvious quality that plays well with clients in the state and elsewhere. Aggie to the Bone George Burke, senior vice president of cen- tral engineering for Hayward Baker, describes Boehm as “Aggie to the bone,” another hard to define phrase. Burke says Boehm has the “gift of effective communication” and is willing to share his lessons learned with younger engineers, and is good at market- ing, technology and at managing people. Burke also points to Hayward Baker’s four awards: one each for Leadership, Team-Building, Business Development and Entrepreneurship. These awards have been given only twice, and this year, Dennis Boehm was the winner for Business Development. That honor recognized his achievement in developing the firm’s soil mixing business. When Boehm came to Texas, the firm was working mainly in expansive soils, and it was his job to convince others that Hayward Baker could do many other things well. They had acquired Woodbine, a firm Boehm encountered earlier in his career. Back then Woodbine told a highly skeptical Boehm that they could solidify a challenging landfill site with slurry injections, Boehm passed on this opportunity to step out on the edge early in his career, and instead designed driven steel piles to support the foundation elements. Shortly after Boehm joined Hayward Baker, he had lost his initial skepticism of what could be done to improve such poor DEEP FOUNDATIONS • JULY/AUG 2013 • 45
