Secret Of My Success -- Engineer Bridges Obstacles To Find Transportation Solutions

Prakash Limaye, president

Alpha Engineers Inc.

Accomplishment: Originally from Bombay, India, Limaye got a master's degree in engineering from Yale in 1960 and designed and inspected bridges for engineering companies in Olympia, Tacoma and Seattle. He started Alpha Engineering, a bridge-design-and-inspection company, in 1981 with partner David Lanning. The Tukwila-based company now employs 118 people and has branch offices in Denver, Phoenix and Sacramento.

Alpha recently received the grand award from the Consulting Engineers Council of Washington for its design of the North Oxbow Bridge across the Duwamish River in South Seattle. The company is designing 13 miles of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes on Route 167 in the Green River Valley, and has lucrative contracts to do bridge inspections for the Colorado Department of Highways and the Oregon Department of Transportation. He also won a contract to help the state of California make its existing bridges more earthquake-proof.

Quote: ``I enjoy being helpful in the transportation business. I can see the effects when we widen a road and the traffic flow improves; or, when we build a new bridge, and we don't have to worry about someone falling in the drink because of a bad bridge.''

Advice: ``Engineers need to broaden their horizons and learn all aspects of the business before starting their own companies. They need to have construction experience, engineering experience and liability experience before venturing into something more complex. It's never smooth sailing in business, and you need to set a goal upfront. You can be very profitable by doing the same thing again and again, but if you want to be big, you will have to delegate authority. You can't say you are going to continue to do everything yourself.''

Setback: ``Picking the wrong client on a job who didn't pay us. This was five years ago when we were a small company. The client declared Chapter 11 (bankruptcy reorganization), and we were an unsecured creditor and lost $50,000 or $60,000. We certainly learned you have to do your homework. It's resulted in our current philosophy that most of our work will be for governments. We backed off on expanding our client base of private companies.''

Reported by Times South bureau business reporter John H. Stevens. Send your nominations for ``Secret of my success'' to The Times bureau. We need your name, the name of your nominees, along with their company and phone number and a brief description of how or why they are successful.