Being An Engineer: From Thought Exercise to Effective Marketing, with Aaron Moncur

For Aaron Moncur, a podcast is more than just a marketing tool. It's a way to build relationships, showcase expertise, and ultimately drive revenue for his custom engineering services business. With over 250 published episodes, Moncur's "Being an Engineer" podcast has become a cornerstone of his company's growth strategy.

0:00 Intro
3:14 How Aaron became an engineer
4:51 Why launch a podcast?
12:13 Measuring podcasting success
17:42 Podcast team and workflow
19:41 What is the future of Being An Engineer?
27:15 Contacting Aaron + Outro

This episode was produced by Red Cedar Marketing.  Need help launching and running a business podcast that actually produces results? Visit www.redcedarmarketing.com. 

Transcript

Copy

John Tyreman 0:05

Welcome business podcasters to another episode of podcasting and professional services. If this is your first time here, this podcast features stories of experts and professional service providers who have created a business impact through the power of podcasting. I'm your host, John Tyerman. And if you're watching this on YouTube, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating and review. Today's show features a successful podcast in the AEC space with our guest, Aaron Moncur, host of being an engineer. In this conversation, Aaron shares the thought exercise from a business coach that led him to starting his podcast in the first place, how Aaron measures success and the difference between feel good and real good metrics. Um, he also shared an example of how his podcast contributes to the revenue for his firm. And he shared a look at what his podcast team and workflow look like. But first. Before we get to Aaron, imagine you're able to build trust with buyers, accelerate your network's growth, and create endless content all from one activity. That's the power of podcasting. If you're ready to explore this idea of launching a podcast for your business, I'm offering a free podcast consultation. Please go to redcedarmarketing. com. Send me a message on LinkedIn to get in touch. All right. And now for my conversation with Aaron Moncker. today my guest is Aaron Moner, owner of Pipeline Design and Engineering and host of the Being An Engineer podcast, which has over 250 published episodes. Aaron and his team develops custom equipment, fixtures and automation for engineering and manufacturing teams. If you are an engineer, checkout his website, www team pipeline us. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Moncur 1:49

Thank you so much, John. What a honor and a privilege it is to be here.

John Tyreman 1:54

I appreciate that, you know, and I was doing some background research and I listened to the pilot episode of your podcast and I noticed you have this peculiar hatred of newspaper, the way it feels, the smell, the ink. My, my question to you, Aaron is. When did you first realize that you hated newspaper?

Aaron Moncur 2:13

Oh, I think it was pretty young. I'm not sure if I was in the womb still, but it was young. I remember when I was maybe in second or third grade, there was a class assignment back in elementary school that required us to handle newspaper. I can't remember exactly what we were doing, but we had to handle newspaper. I refuse to do it. I said, teacher, this is not for me. If you want me to do this assignment, that's fine. But you're going to have to be the one who actually touches this stuff. And I'll direct you. And she was very kind and actually did that for me. So it's as long as I can remember, I have, fostered a, Deep dislike of everything newspaper related, except the people, the people, of course, no problem. Oh, of course,

John Tyreman 2:57

yeah. Well, today, you know, newspapers have largely gone the way of the dinosaur. News is mostly consumed online, so it's kind of in your favor there. I was born at the right time. Exactly. Yeah. on a recent, episode, you mentioned that your father was an inspiration to becoming an engineer. And as you like to ask your guests on your show, I figured we'd flip the script a little bit. I want to ask you, how did you become an engineer?

Aaron Moncur 3:23

Yeah, it was It's kind of embarrassing because I feel like it was, I was not very intentional at all about it in high school. I was much more interested in surfing and hanging out with friends than I was. I grew up in Hawaii. so I was at the beach all the time and did not give a lot of thought to what the future held. So my senior year. We're sitting at the dinner table, having family dinner. And my dad says, so what are you going to do in college? You know, like what's, what's the plan here? And I said, I don't, I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. And he says, we should consider becoming an engineer. I think you'd be good at it. And I said, great, that sounds wonderful. Let's do that. And I really, truly didn't know. You know, I knew engineers were kind of like there was a mechanical aspect. Maybe you built things, but I didn't understand really what an engineer was. But luckily my dad knows me pretty well. And so I, I, signed up for the mechanical engineering program. And as I learned more about about it, I realized, yeah, this is a good fit for me. I do enjoy working with my hands and designing things and, you know, some math and some science. That's, that's a good fit. So that's how I got into engineering.

John Tyreman 4:40

Excellent. Yeah. Some people are just wired that way, more analytically focused, more thinking of like how things are made and how different components work together. All right, so let's, shift gears a little bit. Let's talk about your experience running your podcast being an engineer. So it's a weekly interview series that features engineers and engineering adjacent roles, maybe teaming partners, project managers and such. Looking in the back catalog of your episodes, it looks like you launched in April 2020. Do I have that right? That sounds about right. I think so. Well, let's, let's take a walk down memory lane. What went into the decision to launch that podcast?

Aaron Moncur 5:24

This decision, thankfully, was a bit more intentional than my decision to become an engineer. And it was COVID time, right? This is kind of the beginning of COVID. I think what it was February or so, January, February of 2020, when COVID really started ramping up. And I was part of a business coaching group at the time. And our group mentor said to us, Hey, what if COVID shuts your business down? What if you have to close the doors, what are you going to do next? And that didn't seem like, I mean, there were certainly businesses for which COVID was a pretty dark time, right? And a lot of businesses did shut down. Thankfully ours was not one of them. We, we kind of sailed through unscathed during that time, even, even grew a little bit, but I thought it was. From an academic standpoint, a really interesting question. And so I thought, huh, what would I do if I had to shut down pipeline and do something completely different? And I started asking myself, well, what are the things that I really do enjoy? And then I think I'm pretty good at, ironically, I think I'm just, Kind of a average engineer. there are certain areas within engineering where I think I'm above average, but there are a lot of other areas where I'm probably below. And so my immediate thought was not, Oh, I'd started another engineering company. I started thinking about, well, what about like public speaking or, or writing? These are things that I do kind of enjoy. I'm. I've always been pretty good with communication, not necessarily knowing exactly like the right words. My vocabulary isn't the, you know, I'm not like a English professor at a university or anything like that, but, but taking a thought from my brain and putting that thought into someone else's brain. I've always been pretty good at that as well as understanding what thoughts, I need to put into my brain from, from other people. And so I was thinking about what if I became an author or a public speaker or something like that. And, and these things were, you know, so out in left field compared to what I've been doing engineering, I thought, is there, is there a bridge there somewhere? And I thought, well, what about a podcast interviewing engineers? That can be kind of cool. That would be, Fun and interesting. And I enjoy learning. I'd get to interact with smart people and learn from them. And I got kind of excited about it and then very quickly realized why I don't need to wait until my business goes out of business to start this podcast. And I'll just start it now as, as part of our marketing effort. So that's podcast got started.

John Tyreman 8:03

Excellent. Well, you're not just an engineer. Now you're, you're a business owner. You're a podcaster too. So there's multi facets to Aaron Monker.

Aaron Moncur 8:13

That's true. That's true. I like to say that, I'd rather be. A marketing company that does engineering than, the other way around.

John Tyreman 8:21

There you go. That's right. And in today's day and age, everyone's becoming kind of a media company out of necessity, right? I like to, to look at generative AI as a complete disrupter to the marketing industry. But as a product of that, how do you differentiate against AI generated content? Well, you can with, you know, more human marketing, like a podcast or a video series or things like that. I was listening to your pilot episode zero, and you were very upfront that the podcast was a marketing tool for your company, but that you were going to be discreet about it and focus on creating value for your listeners. And I have a few questions about that, but let's start here. I like how you say engineers are the reason the world works the way it does. they're the problem solvers of the world. Do you feel that you've done, your job in terms of delivering value to your listeners over the course of 250 episodes?

Aaron Moncur 9:20

I do. Yeah. And the way I measure that is by the feedback that I get. one of our engineering managers at Pipeline likes to say the meaning of the communication is the response that you get, and. I regularly have folks reaching out to me on LinkedIn or sending me an email listeners at the podcast saying, Hey, thank you so much for doing this. I have learned so much from this podcast. I appreciate it. Please keep it up. So when I'm getting comments like that regularly, I think it serves as pretty good evidence that we're doing a good job in, in serving our community. Community of engineers.

John Tyreman 10:00

Yeah. I like to think of that as those are signals from, from your, your listenership and those signals can tell you they can help guide you in one direction or another. you know, obviously the positive feedback is great reinforcement, but then there's also some good constructive criticism that can come out of that feedback as well. Do you, I'm curious of those listeners who give you that feedback. Do you have like a couple of like, let's call them Mount Rushmore listeners who like regularly tune in? Do you tap into to them at all at all for feedback?

Aaron Moncur 10:30

I haven't, you know, that's a good point. It would be nice. One of the things that I have realized we are missing is. a robust mechanism for communicating with our listeners. I honestly don't know how to do that. And maybe you have some ideas. I'd love to hear about that. But we don't have like a list of all of our listeners, you know, so it's hard to, to get feedback directly. There's some people, right, who reach out to me who I could, and, and I do, ask questions of, but I'd love to send out a survey to, you know, whatever, tens of thousands of people out there who have heard the podcast and get, and get more feedback.

John Tyreman 11:11

Yeah, when I've talked to, other folks who run interview type shows, one thing that, one common theme I'm starting to hear is that, they're shifting away from interview, like solely interview shows and going to, it's like, Spreading those out, but peppering in monologue episodes, where it's just you talking into a microphone and, you know, that could be one way where you could add in a call to action, like, Hey, take this survey, go to, team pipeline. us slash survey and, and take the survey there. another way that I've seen podcasters do this, is associate a newsletter with the podcast too. So that folks can subscribe and, you know, it could be another way to consume, consume your content outside of listening to it. They can read it too. but then you'd have the ability to, to have like communicate with them.

Aaron Moncur 12:02

Yeah.

John Tyreman 12:03

Great ideas is those are just a couple that I've seen. thinking of the podcast as a way to market your business through COVID, and kind of building on that idea. What were some of your goals when you set out and then maybe how has that podcast performed relative to and what you expected?

Aaron Moncur 12:22

Well, I had vanity goals and I had what I'll call real goals a friend of mine likes to say There are feel good and real good Activities that we can participate in. And the feel good activities are maybe the fun ones that will make us feel good, but the real good ones are the ones that actually matter that moved the needle for whatever our goal is. So I had some vanity metrics that I was trying to hit, which I still have not hit, but the, the real good goals where I wanted to acquire more revenue or generate more revenue for, for my company and that we have done, I can, I can measure. a significant amount of, of revenue back to the podcast. So, in, in the real good sense, it's been definitely worthwhile.

John Tyreman 13:12

So when you say attribute revenue to, is that in terms of like leads that have been generated from the podcast, either people, either leads listening to the podcast and reaching out to you, or were they previously guests on your podcast that decided to work with you? How did that materialize?

Aaron Moncur 13:29

Yeah, mostly the latter. in fact, I'm not sure we've had any just kind of leads float in from listeners, but guests who have been on the show, you know, I can, I can call a VP of engineering somewhere at a company that I'd like to do business with. And this person is, Almost certainly not going to answer the phone and almost certainly not going to respond to my email because he or she gets, you know, a dozen Interactions like this every week. However, if I have that person on the podcast as a guest now I get to spend an hour with him or her Talking about engineering, getting to know each other, building rapport, developing a relationship. And this has happened several times at the end of the podcast, we finished recording and the guest says, so tell me a little bit more about what you all do. And I say, great. Yeah, this is what we do. And, and then a few times those conversations have led to, we actually need some help in that area. Why don't let's set up another call and talk. So in terms of generating revenue for our business, which is a service do engineering services. It's been a lot more effective, just developing relationships with guests on the podcast, as opposed to generating leads from those who are listening.

John Tyreman 14:50

And that's a product of how you. Positioned your podcast to alongside of how you've positioned your company. you're, you're, you're working with engineering teams. So yeah, of course it makes sense to bring in engineers and interview them on your podcast. can you share with our listeners a little bit of, maybe some of the projects that you've done with some of the, folks that you work with,

Aaron Moncur 15:13

sure. One that comes to mind that was directly, from the podcast was an engineering or a manufacturer in, I guess I won't say where they are, but they, they manufacture a medical device and they had these, these cartons, these boxes, basically packaging for their medical device. And they're not like the boxes that you get from Amazon. They're really thin, maybe a half inch or a five eighths of an inch thick and made out of heavy kind of cardstock material. they have different sizes, very different sizes. Some of them are shaped kind of like squares, maybe 12 by 12 inches. Others are really long and skinny, maybe four or five inches wide, but 50 or 60 inches long. And what they were finding is that they'll receive these cartons flat from their supplier. And then the operators at this medical device company have to pop them open. They have to erect these flat cartons and then stuff them with a product, close the tabs, put a label on them and send them on their way. And this process of erecting the cartons, taking them from a flat state to a popped open state apparently was giving the operators repetitive stress injuries in their wrists, just that that motion of opening these cartons day after day. you know, eight hours every day, they were developing repetitive stress injuries. So after I had interviewed one of their engineering managers, we started talking and I shared a little bit about what we do. And he said, Hey, we, we need a way to automate this manual process right now. So we ended up building this really cool, fully automated machine. There's a robot hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling of this robotic cell and their motors and pneumatic actuators and sensors and things. And, it, it picks up these flat cartons and it erects them. It folds the tabs close on one end and then drops them off on an operator's table to stuff it with a product. Fold the, the tabs closed on the other end and, and send it on its way. So it, it was a great solution for them. The operators no longer have to perform that, that dangerous activity that was giving them carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive stress injuries and worked out well for everyone.

John Tyreman 17:32

That's a, that's a great story and a great example of how you help your clients. But then, I think it's also a great, example of, you know, how business can be generated from a podcast too. So, well, speaking of process automation and thinking of processes, I'd like to shift gears a little bit away from the. Business side of podcasting and look at kind of like behind the scenes and your operation, your workflow behind the podcast. My question is what does your podcast team look like today? And how has that changed over the last four years?

Aaron Moncur 18:07

Yeah, we established our team pretty early in the very beginning. It was me and our integrator. Nikki, who were working on the podcast, I would record that I would send the files to Nikki and she would process them and, publish them after just maybe a couple of months, we realized we probably needed a little bit more help. And so we brought in Josh Romney, who is a good friend of mine from a long time ago and a sound engineer. And so now he does all of the heavy lifting when it comes to editing the podcast episodes. And then we have Katrina, who is our producer. And once the episode is, is, published, Katrina will send it out to the guest. She'll notify them. She'll do the, um, the LinkedIn post about it. She'll, she'll put it on our other social channels, I think it's just the four of us mainly.

John Tyreman 19:07

I'm curious. How far out of a buffer do you have in terms of like content recorded in the can?

Aaron Moncur 19:12

It varies. it's been anywhere between two and eight weeks.

John Tyreman 19:17

one of the worst positions you can be in as a podcaster is if you don't have content for like an upcoming episode, that's, that's like a, a pretty stressful place to be in.

Aaron Moncur 19:27

Yeah. Yeah. We've, there have been a few times when we've put some reruns in.

John Tyreman 19:32

Yeah, that's, that's another good point. I'm curious, like at, at, after a few hundred episodes, I'm sure that you've learned a lot along the way, where do you plan to take the show from here? What is the, what does the future look like for being an engineer?

Aaron Moncur 19:46

I struggle with that a little because. Primarily it is a marketing tool for the company, uh, engineering services. And so I want to focus the content on our target demographic engineers, but at the same time, I've interviewed a lot of engineers now, and I started to hear a lot of recurring themes and patterns. I think it would be interesting to open it up and just do interesting interviews with anyone, any, any professional out there. But that starts to dilute our message a bit, so I'm not sure exactly what I'm gonna do.

John Tyreman 20:23

in talking with a few other, podcasters who do interview shows, one thing that is kind of like a, a common theme to your point that I've started to notice is that a lot of these podcasters take their interviews that they do. And they turn it into a book or they turn it into like a comprehensive research report. So that could be another way that you could take, kind of take this library of content that you have and repackage it in a way that's still very, very insightful. You're curating a lot of expertise.

Aaron Moncur 20:51

That is something I've thought about. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. something else I've done that. I think users might find interesting and our listeners might find interesting and they could do them themselves is incorporated into a custom GPT. Now you can make your own GPTs now. Right. And so what we've done is we have transcripts for all the episodes in a PDF ends up being a really big, long PDF, but we upload that into this custom GPT. And now you can query the GPT and say, Hey, Hey, Hey, If I were a senior level engineer and I were faced with this problem, what are some ideas for how I might solve it? And the GPT will look through, you know, 200 plus episodes and give you some ideas for maybe how to go about solving that problem based on what real world senior level engineers have done.

John Tyreman 21:46

That's that's next level stuff, Aaron. That is really cool. And so you've built that in for your show and you've uploaded a bunch of episodes to it. Is that something that's like you've got to do in batches or is that embedded into your workflow where each transcript gets uploaded?

Aaron Moncur 22:02

We do it in batches. Yeah, it would be a pain to do it after every episode. So what we're doing right now is, by the season. So we've got seasons one through four that are uploaded right now.

John Tyreman 22:13

And I'm sure that there's probably tons of different applications for that and how it can support not just your business, but maybe college students who are interested in engineering. Maybe they can learn about what are some of the different career paths or how does one get into engineering? I just see so many different directions that you could take that.

Aaron Moncur 22:33

Yeah, you can, you can ask the GPT anything you want that's engineering related, whether it's about a technical aspect or the soft skills of engineering, or the business of engineering. And there's information about all of those things and much, much more.

John Tyreman 22:48

so Aaron, What's, is there a particular story or maybe an interview or maybe something behind the scenes that happened with your podcast? Just like a memory that you will never forget.

Aaron Moncur 23:00

Well, there, there are a couple, I guess. one that comes to mind, there's this guy named James Hobson and he is, a YouTube celebrity. His YouTube name is the Hacksmith and he's done these really cool videos where, or projects, I should say, where he takes a technology, like a sci fi technology from the movies, like a lightsaber, something like that. Batman's grappling hooks, something like that. And he makes it real. I mean, to an extent. Some of these things, like a lightsaber, you can't quite make real, but he gets pretty close. And he's grown wildly over the years. I think he's been doing this now for 12 or 14 years, something like that. He's got 10 million subscribers on YouTube. He's built a whole business around it. He has a full engineering team. To help with these projects. And I sent him a, just a random email and said, Hey, you should be on our podcast. You know, you're an engineer. You've built this really cool YouTube channel. You do neat things, no expectation that he would respond, right? Like this guy is kind of a big deal. Sure. And he wrote back. He said, yeah, let's do it. And so we had this guy who with a 10 million YouTube subscribers on our podcast as a guest, and he just, you know, shared some cool stories. And it was a neat experience. My kids actually, thought I was cool because I was talking to the Hacksmith and they would, they used to watch all his videos online. So I got to bask in, in, the associative limelight of, of the Hacksmith. in my kid's eyes for a bit. That was neat. Yeah, that, that is really cool. Yeah. And then the other one, in engineering, we use something called CAD very often, computer aided design, and arguably the most common CAD software out there is called SolidWorks. It doesn't really matter that much what it's called, but. The founder of SolidWorks is a gentleman named, John Hershtick and, his team reached out to me actually and said, Hey, John would like to be on the show. And again, John is like this. I mean, if you're an engineer, you know what SolidWorks is. You probably use it every day. It's been around for 25 years and it's, it's kind of a pillar of the engineering community. And so To be able to interview the founder of this cornerstone software was really neat. And one of the stories he told about the early days, just funding, how he funded SolidWorks, John went to school at, at MIT. And I guess, on weekends or maybe during the week, he'd go with a group to Vegas and count cards and, and, and win at gambling. And he used the winnings from. Counting cards to fund the beginning of what is now SolidWorks, which I thought was just such a great story. They actually made a movie kind of tangentially about his group doing that. I can't remember what the name 21, right? Is that it? Maybe that's it. I don't think so. I know i've seen it, but I can't remember the name.

John Tyreman 25:59

Oh, that is, that is too cool. Yeah. I think what that does, Aaron, is that just shows you how podcasting can unlock conversations that you wouldn't normally have with, without that platform, people that you wouldn't be able to get sales meetings with influencers that you've looked up to in your field that you wouldn't normally be able to have a conversation with. different founders of, technology platforms that you use every day. I just think that's so cool that, it's a platform that invites this, you know, it accelerates your network growth and it helps you connect with, with other people like that. It's just so cool.

Aaron Moncur 26:35

A lot of these, higher level leaders, they're not willing to spend one on one time with you necessarily. But they want to leverage their time so they can leverage your platform to speak to thousands of people, then they're much more willing to have a conversation with you that gets recorded and then distributed across all these different networks.

John Tyreman 26:55

Exactly. well, this is, this has been great, Aaron. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Aaron Moncur 27:04

No, nothing comes to mind. Thank you again for having me on. it's fun for me to have conversations like this, be on the other side of the, of the microphone, so to speak. So thank you, John, for having me on.

John Tyreman 27:15

Absolutely. And if folks that are listening to this podcast episode right now, and they want to connect with you, where can they find you?

Aaron Moncur 27:22

Our podcast is called being an engineer and that's on all the major podcast platforms. And if you want to check out our engineering work, you can go to teampipeline. us.

John Tyreman 27:37

Excellent. Aaron, thank you so much for your time.

Aaron Moncur 27:39

All right. Thanks, John.

John Tyreman 27:41

All right. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Aaron Monker. If you made it this far, please leave a rating on Apple podcasts, like, and subscribe to the show and send me a note on LinkedIn with your feedback. Would love to hear from you. All right. Until next time. Happy podcasting.