Women in AEC: Wine After Work

A senior civil PE seat has been open for eight months, and the firm's explanation is "nobody's applied." In this solo episode, Bryce Batts takes on the most common thing AEC firm leaders say about hiring: the candidates just aren't out there. Drawing on 20+ years of AEC recruiting and a database of 171,000 architects and engineers, Bryce explains why the headline jobs numbers say nothing about the...

Maria Skoutari never planned to become a mentor, a Part 3 examiner, or a podcast host. She started with a love of art, found architecture almost by accident, and later created Part3 With Me because no one had explained to her what the final qualification would ask of her. In this episode, Maria tells the story of how a podcast she expected no one to hear turned into mentoring, mock interviews, and...

What happens when you realize being a great leader doesn't mean being the smartest person in the room? This week on Women in AEC: Wine After Work , Bryce Batts sits down with Annie Bevan, founder and CEO of the Sustainability Management & Strategy Collaborative (SMSC), for a candid conversation about entrepreneurship, building successful teams, navigating leadership as a woman, and knowing when it...

Firms promote their strongest technical people into leadership and then give them almost no training. When a team struggles, leaders often blame the team. Amanda Van Der Heiden has seen this play out across dozens of organizations, and she argues the problem usually starts with how people are being led. Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make co...

Every career advice list says to protect your relationships. Almost nobody explains what that looks like day to day. Julia Hurley has built a real estate business, a political career, and an athlete management company on relationships, so she knows the how. Julia and Bryce compare matchmaking in real estate and recruiting, and why buyers and candidates are both getting choosier. Julia explains how...

Most AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft. Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a...

Bryce just got back from Women in HVACR in Indianapolis, where she spoke to a room full of owners and managers about a number that should keep them up at night: women are leaving the trades at roughly three times the rate they are getting hired into them. Every job fair booth, every high school program, every recruiting push is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. This is not a DE...

Barb Allen spent 20 years on commercial job sites, starting as a carpenter apprentice in 1997 and working her way up to superintendent. She was the first woman her company had ever hired out of college for that track. She left the built environment in 2022 after a meeting where leadership told her she was "difficult to work with," then admitted nobody could say how. That meeting became a book. In...

Architecture is usually discussed as a service. A client has a need, a firm delivers a building, everyone moves on to the next project. Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni makes a harder argument. She says the built environment is one of the strongest forces shaping whether people in a place trust each other, and that the consequences of getting it wrong can take generations to show up. She would know. Marwa is...

You've optimized your schedule, pushed through the late nights, and kept delivering — but you still feel like you're running on empty. What if the missing link isn't mindset or time management... it's nutrition? Valerie Hawkins is a nutritionist and self-concept coach who left engineering to help women tackle anxiety, burnout, and brain fog through the power of what they eat. In this episode, she...

Architects have been losing ground for years, and the industry keeps explaining it away with fee pressure, schedule pressure, and software. Beau [Last Name] has a less comfortable answer. He says the profession's own craft has declined, and that decline is exactly why architects keep getting moved further from the decisions that matter. His case runs like this. When drawings are incomplete and coo...

If you've ever felt stuck, scared to take the next step, or unsure of where you're headed — this episode is for you. Career and vision coach Carey Conley has spent 21+ years helping entrepreneurs and AEC professionals ditch fear-driven thinking and build a life with intention and purpose.   In this conversation, Carey breaks down why so many high-achieving women in technical fields stay trapped in...

Great healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operatio...

Growth is supposed to feel like winning. For a lot of contractors, it feels like drowning. Derek Isaac, founder of Rapid Result Creators, spent more than 20 years in construction and real estate before turning that experience into a systems coaching practice for general contractors and home builders. In this episode, he breaks down why a growing business quietly becomes harder to run, and what to...

Lauren Weinbaum didn't leave a job she hated. She left one she loved, because a client offered to hire her company before she'd even started one. In this episode, the founder and president of Weinbaum Management Group walks through how a one-way flight to LAX and a single conversation turned into a 13-year run in aviation and large commercial construction. We get into the decisions most founders d...

Growth sounds good — until it's actually crushing you. More projects, more staff, more stress, and somehow less profit. Award-winning contractor and business scaling expert Shena Marie White has seen it happen to too many firms, and she's made it her mission to change the pattern.   In this episode, Shena breaks down the strategic mindset, operational systems, and wealth-building habits that separ...

Rima Nasser founded TEW Design Studio in 2015 because she wanted to design at the level of care she actually believed in, not the level a typical firm structure allowed. That drive for autonomy eventually led her to launch her own furniture collection, TEWlines, in 2024. In this episode, she talks with Bryce about what real ownership over your work looks like, and why "being your own boss" was nev...

Every firm competing for talent is saying the same things. Great culture. Exciting projects. Competitive benefits. And candidates can't tell any of you apart. That's the problem James Ellis has built a career solving. In this episode, James breaks down what employer brand actually is (hint: not a campaign, not a vibe, not a careers page redesign) and how midsized companies can build a brand that w...

Cintia Arnhoffer is a Hungarian entrepreneur, real estate investor, and business consultant based in Dubai. At 21, she moved to Denmark, where she spent 13 years building her career across diverse international environments. She later relocated to Dubai alone, without contacts or an existing network, and built a new life and business from scratch. Today she is Co-Owner and General Manager of FullC...

The women who thrive in the next decade of AEC won't just be technically excellent they'll know how to leverage AI as a tool for growth, income, and creative problem-solving. Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is the CEO of Clarity AI, ranked the #4 Voice AI Influencer globally by Voicebot.ai, and author of the Amazon bestseller Your AI Roadmap: Expand Your Career, Money, and Joy (Wiley, 2025).   In this e...

The right fit doesn't always show up first. Sometimes it shows up after you've tried the wrong things, learned what you're actually made of, and gotten honest about what you're uniquely positioned to build. Lindsay Friedman is a four-time founder who failed twice before finding the work that was hers to do and she built it directly from her experience as a caregiver. Lindsay joins Bryce to talk ab...

Leaving a career you're good at is harder than leaving one that isn't working. Ryan Sullivan was a successful mechanical engineer who built a department from scratch — and then chose to walk away and start over. This episode is about that decision, what it took, and what he's built on the other side. Ryan joins Bryce to talk about career transitions, financial autonomy, and what it looks like to b...

High performance and burnout are not opposites. For a lot of people, they're the same thing wearing different clothes. This episode is for the professional who is achieving by every external measure and still feeling like something is off — because that feeling is data, not weakness. Nancy Gentle Boudrie joins Bryce to talk about the inside-out approach to career alignment: what it means to make r...

There's a gap between people who grow in their careers and people who wait to be grown. This episode is for anyone sitting in that gap, wondering why the effort isn't translating. Elizabeth Barber has a clear answer and it has nothing to do with working harder. Elizabeth and Bryce dig into workplace autonomy, practical innovation, and what it actually looks like to take ownership of your visibilit...

Most AEC firms treat PR like a nice-to-have, something you think about after you've won the work. Julia Bonner, founder and president of Pierce Public Relations, has spent her career proving that's exactly backwards. In this conversation with Bryce, Julia gets into what strategic communications actually looks like for firms in the built environment and why the firms investing in their story now ar...