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By Christine
Imbs
The last thing
Ed Alizadeh wanted to do was to work for his father.
“My dad started
this business in 1984 and he began working on me pretty quickly
to join him when I graduated from college,” he says. “But I told
my wife I didn’t want to work for my dad. I wanted to blaze my
own trail.”
And he did
just that going to work for Amoco Production Company, now British
Petroleum. But five years later his trail led him back home and
today he’s president and CEO of Geotechnology, the St. Louis-based
engineering and environmental services company founded by his
father.
“Two things
made me finally accept my dad’s offer,” he says. “One is that
we were starting a family and I thought St. Louis would be a good
place to do that. And two, Geotechnology had started to get involved
in environmental engineering and that was something I was really
interested in.” Alizadeh started working as a staff engineer in
Geotechnology’s environmental group in 1989. At the time, they
were just entering the underground storage tank (UST) assessment
and remediation market. His experience with Amoco helped the company
get a foothold in the UST market. He was promoted to project manager
five years later, then environmental department manager. And in
1996, he stopped working for his father when he took over the
company.
“When my dad
made me president, he moved out of the way pretty quickly,” he
says. “He told me that the only way to run a company is to really
be in charge. If he were around here second-guessing me, people
would think he was still in charge and it wouldn’t work. He was
very generous in that respect.”
Like his son,
he was also a bit of a trail blazer. He and his wife, both civil
engineers in Tehran, Iran, moved to the United States in 1958.
He worked for a construction company here and then a national
consulting firm before taking the risk and starting his own business.
Alizadeh says this is probably why he chose a career in engineering
himself; that, and the fact that he loved math and science.
“I guess it’s
in the gene pool though,” Alizadeh says with a smile. “My daughter
is 18 and is about to go into civil engineering, as well. But
my dad did have a big influence on me. My wife tells me that she’s
always seeing me do stuff like him.”
Alizadeh says
some of the best advice he’s ever gotten has come from his father.
“He said you
can’t replace good judgment. You can have all the degrees in the
world, but it’s a person’s ability to display good judgment that’s
critical. But I guess the best advice came when I took over from
him,” he says. “He told me not to just do things the way he did.
Times change and you have to be willing to change with them. Of
course there are some who may wonder, why change something if
it works? Well, it’s not going to work forever. People catch up.
And successful people are always changing.”
Since Alizadeh’s
taken over, Geotechnology has opened offices in Collinsville,
Ill. and Kansas City, Kan. The number of employees has grown from
55 to about 120, including both the Illinois and KC offices. And
the company is now taking on some much larger projects as they
celebrate 25 years in business in September. They’ve worked on
the new Busch Stadium, MetroLink, and the Ameristar Casino, which
earned them the 2008 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement
Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers-St. Louis.
They also landed the biggest project in their company’s history—the
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport expansion.
“It’s great
being a part of something that makes such a big impact and enhances
the community. It energizes me. But the company’s success isn’t
just about me,” he says. “It’s because of a whole bunch of good
people working together. Without them it wouldn’t work.”
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TalkingPOINTS
FAMILY:
Wife, Brenda; two daughters
HIGH SCHOOL:
Parkway West
FAVORITE BOOKS: “First Break all the Rules” by Marcus
Buckingham and Curt Coffman; also history books primarily
by Stephen Ambrose
FAVORITE MUSICAL GROUP: The Who.
HOBBIES: “I was into bike riding for a while, but
now I’m hooked on golf.”
TRAVEL: “If I was going on my last vacation ever
I’d say Vail, Colo.”
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