A personal account from Rose Kennedy — Owner, Crafted Structural Engineering, PLLC
Two years ago, I realized my time wasn’t aligned with where I wanted to go. I was hitting a ceiling inside a good firm — not because of any active limitation, but because my ambitions pointed somewhere different. Starting something of my own felt scary. I knew others who had done it and I still wasn’t sure it was the right move for me.
What changed it was time to think. The design work I was doing was genuinely interesting, but it wasn’t the whole picture. The biggest tension in residential and commercial construction today is the friction between architectural design and structural reality — sometimes it feels like we’re negotiating with the laws of physics to meet what clients and architects envision. That tension is where I wanted to focus.
Crafted Structural Engineering, PLLC was founded with that pain in mind. It started as a side hustle. Then people started coming to me directly. The business structure was easy enough to set up. Growing from engineer to business owner was the real work — it took business coaching, building out operations, and putting real sales and marketing processes in place before things could scale.
Around the time I started the company, I engaged SBS. Over the following year and a half, they provided core business insights, sat down with me for hours at a time when I needed it, and ultimately connected me with outbound salespeople and software that let me go full-time within three months of launching my first telemarketing campaign. That stretch also produced the best earning months of my career and set up what comes next.
What I learned along the way
1. Don’t waste the time you’re given — make yourself uncomfortable
Through my own business and through ventures my spouse runs, I’ve gone to conferences, stepped in to save client relationships on the edge of falling apart, and invested in private placements. Each one felt uncomfortable at first. The rising stakes and the harder path turned out to be better preparation for what came next than the easier road would have been.
2. Telemarketing can be done with class
Telemarketing has a bad reputation because most people do it badly: high-volume spam calls, no relationship-building, no real value to the person on the other end. In structural engineering, reputation is everything. That means calls focused on letting people know I exist and building actual relationships — not running a script designed to extract money from strangers. It has become one of the most important parts of how I find work.
3. Imposter syndrome is all in your head. Just start.
Early on, I genuinely wondered why anyone would want to work with me specifically. Talking to the people who did want to work with me answered it quickly. People want to pull each other up. Getting over that mental hurdle took some time, but the architect relationships I’ve built since — relationships that didn’t exist even a few months ago — make the future feel much more concrete.
4. Performance-based work can close jobs that would otherwise go nowhere
I’ve run into situations where budgets were tight or work couldn’t move forward unless my fee was deferred. Taking that on means two things: I can take on projects that genuinely need help but would otherwise get passed around between firms, and I can charge a reasonable premium for taking on more risk. It is not a license to be unreasonable about pricing — it is a tool that makes more work possible for both sides.
5. Investing in yourself compounds faster than anything else
This advice gets repeated until it sounds hollow. But here is what it actually looked like in 18 months: earnings that went through the roof, a rate of learning that has made me more useful to the people I work with, and relationships that have opened doors I couldn’t have predicted. The compounding here is real and it moves faster than I expected.
6. The hard path prepares you in ways the easy one cannot
Before this, I was one of the stronger producers at my firm. It was a reasonable life. But the commute, the time-for-money trade, and the Sunday dread took more out of me than I wanted to admit. Going out on your own looks scary from the outside. From the inside, success is project-based rather than hour-based, and the days have a different texture when the work is yours. Walking across the hall to my home office has reached a level of comfort that is genuinely hard to put into words.
What I am looking forward to
Because the transition happened quickly, I have been deliberate about adjusting to the current project and business structure before pushing further. The next moves are geographic expansion, bringing on new people to handle the growing project load, and tackling the engineering design problems that are shaping the current construction landscape.
I could not have gotten here without SBS. John and the team have been straightforwardly supportive over the last year and a half, and I expect that continues.