It’s no secret that the corporate world is becoming more and more suffocating. That is why people are finding ways to exit gracefully and break free from that structure. This is true for both Dmitry Smirnov and Dana McGlone who Stephen Jaye knows from his previous life as a meteorologist. Dmitry and Dana worked for the engineering sector and water resources sector. They join Stephen on today’s show to share how they went out on their own and built their own consulting business that allows them to choose the projects to work with in order to serve their clients better. Also, they talk about their possible partnership with a former employer on a fairly sizable project. Find out how that’s working out.
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Exiting Gracefully: How Dmitry Smirnov And Dana McGlone Started A Business And Partnering With A Former Employer To Serve Clients Better
Welcome to the show. I originally was a meteorologist. I studied Meteorology and was fascinated with the weather from a young age. A lot of meteorology jobs go in a lot of different directions, and a surprising number of them are all about coding or about writing code, or sometimes even manual data entry.

My guests are people I know from my previous life as a meteorologist who, in their pursuits, have found a way to break free from the corporate structure. As you know, the corporate structure is suffocating a lot of people. We have these old-school ideas, and I won’t go off too much on a tangent about it. I’ll let my guests do the talking. This episode’s guests are Dmitry Smirnov and Dana McGlone, who are the Cofounders of HydroMet Consulting.
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Dima and Dana, welcome to the program.

Thanks so much for having us. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Thanks.

To begin, tell us a little bit about your overall job functions. HydroMet Consulting, I want to orient everyone to what that means. Hydro means water, but maybe not everyone is familiar with what hydrometeorology is.

I would caveat all of this by saying that we are one year into our startup. We are a very fluid company now in terms of our vision. We don’t have a niche that has its upsides, but also its downsides, but in terms of what we do individually, I would call myself the Scientist, which involves a lot of coding, but also a lot of brainstorming of ideas and throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what hits both in terms of day-to-day operations as well as pursuits for the future.

It has been a dream project of ours to go out on our own for a while. Our focus is around heavy rainfall both forecasting and doing a little bit of post-season analysis for our clients. Both of our backgrounds overlap with mostly the engineering sector and water resources sector, so we like to define solutions for our clients that are both satisfactory to the meteorological side of science and solve the problems they’re having.

One of the things that drew me to science originally when I selected a major many years ago was the idea of discovering things, being creative, and problem-solving in a way more about figuring things out. In the corporate structure, do you feel like a lot of scientists in general end up more in the realm of trying to figure out how to make a program work rather than the actual process of scientific discovery and the inquisitiveness and curious mindedness that go along with it?

'I don't feel like I'm letting anyone down when I say, 'Nope I don't have time for that.' Obviously one (of the best benefits of owning your own business) is you get to set your own hours and chose your workload.'Click To Tweet

Yeah. I think you’ve hit on one of the key limitations of being in a larger engineering firm like Dana and I both worked for a number of years. It’s the reality of the projects involved. A lot of the projects that the company did were with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so it was a lot of manual effort in terms of fixing shapefile...