Highlighter Summer 2015

4 | Pond & Company T im Matthews, PE recently joined Pond & Company as the Director of Transportation. Based in Pond’s Atlanta headquarters, he is responsible for the management and growth of Transportation and Roadway Design Program. Tim has over 13 years of experience in the highway industry including roadway design and Program/Project Management. Prior to joining Pond, Tim began and served his entire engineering career at the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT.) He has worked as a Project Manager, design engineer, lead design engineer, and design manager in the office of Roadway Design Program Delivery, TIA, and served as District 6 preconstruction engineer. Project experience includes new location and widening of urban and rural roadways to new interchanges and interstate widening. Projects also include bike/pedestrian and intersection improvements. Additionally, Tim was an instructor for GDOT’s plan development process (PDP) for 8 years and he also led the recent efforts to revise the PDP/PFPR timeline process which has helped to reduce project schedules on average by three (3) months. Tim understands the Federal funding process and has experience with Local Administered Project Process. Tim is a proven Industry Leader! He brings a tremendous amount of depth in transportation experience to our team. His combination of skills and operations knowledge will greatly benefit our transportation clients. Tim and I got to know each other when 1st and 2nd Vice Presidents of the American Society of Highway Engineers (ASHE), respectively. We continued to work together through our leadership progression in ASHE and developed and implemented many changes and improvements to both the local Georgia Section as well as the Region and National organizations. Both Tim and I continued to serve as section Presidents and Tim has progressed to serve as Regional President and is currently serving on the National Level, as well as winning the ASHE National Member of the Year Award in 2014. We were also fortunate to work together on implementing the TIA program through both the Berckmans Road contract and the statewide on call design services contract. During our professional relationship Tim and I have become friends and he has always provided a balanced, honest and thoughtful approach to helping Pond grow and succeed, at GDOT and now at Pond. n Finding Impactful Leaders Finding Leaders Brannen Butts, PE Former Chair of the Leadership Committee of ACEC | 2008 Graduate of the Future Leaders Program The Leadership Committee gave Brannen an opportunity to work with many different types of leaders at once. He observed in them a common thread, that good leaders “are comfortable with calculated, well measured risk.” He notes that getting out of your comfort zone and being able to handle risk are important qualities of a leader. He is inspired by people who are confident enough not to back down from the risks and challenges that are inevitable with any new project. Through ACEC Brannen has also learned the importance of being plugged in to the industry, which translates into good working relationships. He is currently working with Atlanta Gas Light (AGL) on several projects, a connection made through ACEC during his time on the Leadership Committee. “[ACEC] helped me to be a better engineer because it expanded my understanding of the industry as a whole.” “ The owner would change the containers of the smoothie add-ins (protein powders, energy supplements, etc.) but wouldn’t label them so every time a shift started we had no idea where anything was. ” LEADER POND P Ron Osterloh, PE - Vice President -Regarding his first job at a smoothie store