Blog
Notes:
Is it possible to fall in love with engineering again after you lose your initial passion for it? Could pursuing engineering your way by building a business that works on the projects you are passionate about and grows through the years make engineering fun again?
In this episode, Aaron Moncur’s story proves just that. Here, Aaron shares how he fell in love again with engineering through entrepreneurship. As he shares in the podcast, gaining more control over the vision of your career by building a business that allows you to realize that vision could be everything you need to give engineering another shot.
Aaron Moncur is the owner of Pipeline Design & Engineering, a mechanical engineering and product development company that specializes in developing custom equipment, fixtures, machinery, and automation for R&D and manufacturing teams. He has an M.S. in bioengineering and a B.S. in mechanical engineering with over 15 years of product development experience, mainly as an entrepreneur focused on growing his business through sales.
Key Takeaways:
- How Aaron nurtured his entrepreneurial spirit since childhood
- How Aaron turned being laid off into an opportunity to start his own business
- The advice Aaron got from his father-in-law that allowed him to love engineering again
- How Aaron managed to learn and perform different roles to run his company at the start
- The process that Aaron took to learn sales
- Why a founder needs to give up doing technical work to grow the business
- The steps along the way to becoming a sales leader
- How being an introvert has challenged and helped Aaron flourish in sales
- Mechanical engineering skills that can be transferred into sales
- The sales systems that Aaron has put up to run his business
- How to build a content system
- The process of setting time aside for sales emails
- A cool counter-intuitive trick to increase your email response rate
- Why it’s essential to keep in touch with your leads
- The benefits of getting a sales coach
- The differences and similarities between sales and marketing
- The importance of cold-calling and how to do it right
- Why working beyond 8–5 is cheating
- The importance of having a sense of humor
Quotes:
I realized that instead of just being a cog in the machine, I could be the machine and have high-level ownership over the entire process. And that really was transformational for me. Being able to not focus just on like one little detail that maybe my boss tells me to work on but analyzing the project as a whole, and coming up with the strategic approach to it, and executing all of the technical details as well. That was a lot of fun. – Aaron Moncur
I am comfortable putting myself out there and knowing that I’m probably going to make a whole bunch of mistakes. But it has to be done. So let’s just jump in and do it. That’s always the attitude that I’ve had just in life. I’ll figure it out. – Aaron Moncur
A lot of us wait to be perfect, and we never actually go out and try. We try to figure out before doing anything. – Ramzi Marjaba
I think one of the greatest skills a salesperson can have is their ability to shut up and listen. – Aaron Moncur
Everyone’s busy. They’re doing their thing. Even if you send out interesting content, people might not respond because they’re just busy or whatever. But if you ask people to help you with something, I find that the response rate is quite a bit better. – Aaron Moncur
For us sales engineers, a lot of our job is storytelling, which works very well with marketing. I find sales engineers make great marketers because they work with customers. They’re very in tune with what’s going on. They’re very technical. So they can actually be very good marketers. – Ramzi Marjaba
Good marketers make salespeople’s jobs much easier. – Ramzi Marjaba
A person who has exceptional technical skills but doesn’t have soft skills can only go so far in their career. – Aaron Moncur
