Andy McDowell of GenerateYour Value on Spotlight

Welcome, everybody. This is Jane Gardner at Finding your Purpose TV. And today on our show, we have Andy McDowell. Andy is an engineer, so I have something in common with him. We know all about the same challenges of being engineers and being a technician, but he's also creative. So this is surprising because I know many engineers and they're not creative, so I'm going to be looking into that, really and he spent 22 years with the Boeing Company, where he always felt more like a life coach than an engineer and a boss. In 2002, he began his journey into entrepreneurship within a corporation when he was asked to develop an Aerospace design consulting business from scratch, wow, that would be hard, that would serve the global government market. Andy has a bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in electrical engineering and a Master's degree in computer information systems from Georgia State. Naturally, his aviation work took him around the world and enabled him to work on many high profile projects like the Beijing and Sochi airports for their respective Olympic Games. So we're really excited to talk to Andy about basically his purpose and his journey from getting from where he was to where he is now. So, first of all, I better welcome you. Hi. Hi, Jane. Hi. Great to be with you today. Andy, maybe you could tell us. I'm really excited to find out how an engineer can become into the business that you're in. It sounds like your business actually did help you with Finding Your Other purpose. So my husband, he's never really a true engineer, but right now he has to work in engineering. So it's really exciting to see how you manage the journey. Just maybe I can help him get into his retirement. So Andy, please. How did you manage that? So I always had a love for airplanes, built the plastic models as a kid, was fascinated with the fact that such a heavy piece of metal could stay up in the air from that perspective. So I had the opportunity to coming out of grad school and got into a couple of companies that were aviation based, and the last one being that the United States largest exporter, dollar wise company called Boeing. True joy and passion in my life came to be, to be able to work for a company so involved in the aviation community however, it had little to do with electrical engineering. So everything that I learned how to do with airspace design, simulation, modeling, the work that we did was all on the job training, using my technical computer skills at first to help the smaller entrepreneurial company that I work for become digitized and help reduce their expenses by 75% in their delivery time to customers from about two weeks to a couple of days from that perspective. But it was along the journey, 22 years for the Boeing Company, come to find out about the part of the work that I did as I moved up the leadership chain that I enjoyed the most was the engagement with my team members and helping them to grow as individuals as well as growing their position in their careers giving me the most satisfaction and what got me out of the bed every morning regardless of where I was in the world. Because I was spending close to half of the year outside the office and somewhere in the world helping the government bring GPS technology into their flight and ground operations was what we were basically doing, trying to help them be more efficient in their operations using the GPS technology. Wow. Yeah. That's really important. Yeah. That's very exciting that you work for the Beijing and Olympics and everything like that. It must have been high pressure, but you like working with your team members instead of the high pressure. I'm sure. Yeah. So how did you evolve into another business? Obviously, there were certain changes in your position, but maybe you could tell us that. How did you get into coaching? Well, my goal, a career with the Boeing Company was to work for them for about 30 years, I made it to 22 when I, along with thousands