Fortnightly Under Forty: Keegan Odle

Of the 64 rising stars, we selected eleven of them to highlight. These eleven exemplify the impressive record and pace of accomplishments of the best of our industry's next generation. The inspiring stories of Haben Goitom of Alliant Energy, Jennifer Wischnowsky of Ameren, Keegan Odle of Burns & McDonnell, Delevane Diaz of EPRI, Sean Meredith of Entergy, Illinois Commissioner Maria Bocanegra, Aaron Curtis of ITC, Ana Stachowiak of NYPA, Lisa Dailey of Northfork Electric Cooperative, Abbey Roy of Southern Company, and Brian Van Abel of Xcel Energy are told in part in the interviews that follow. These unique up-and-comers are already leading the industry's transformation and mission-critical groups within their organizations, in some cases as a COO, CFO or division VP.
 

PUF: You're the Director of Substation Projects, perhaps one of the biggest design groups at Burns & McDonnell. What do you and your team do?

Keegan Odle: I took over this position a couple of years ago and with great staff was able to grow it. We're sitting now at about three hundred and forty-five full time employees in Kansas City.

That includes engineers, project support, project managers, drafters, and designers that make up our substation group in Kansas City. We've been fortunate to come into the market at the right time. We've hired the right people. I've got a fantastic group of project managers that work on my team, and we have great clients.

I started in this market in January 2004, and that was after the blackout in the Northeast. That created a lot of opportunities throughout my career. We've been fortunate to be in the right markets at the right time with the right model, and that's led us to the growth and size we are today.

PUF: You worked on important projects on substation security, but one that was a turning point was after the attack on the Metcalf substation in California in 2013.

Keegan Odle: Absolutely. Leading up to that point, we trusted that the chain link fences with barbed wire and what we had around substations were enough to protect those assets.

When Metcalf happened, it turned the substation power world on its head, and I realized we have all these multimillion-dollar assets exposed out there, including power transformers and equipment. They're unguarded, and they take about a year for us to replace.

If bad actors were to be coordinated, they could do a lot of damage. We're dependent on consistent, ninety-nine plus percent reliable electricity in the U.S. The whole industry took a deep breath and said, we need to act.

East coast utilities, like one of our clients, have a unique footprint. What they cannot afford is to have a significant power outage with everything that lies between D.C. and the Norfolk Naval Base, which is basically their entire footprint.

When we got that call to help, we both realized we cannot afford to have the backbone of our grid go down due to an external attack, and this was going to be a part of their resiliency strategy. We said, let's come up with a robust design for substation security. They said, our teams are full with reliability improvements. We'd like you to come up with solutions.

That was exciting for me because it gave me an opportunity to do something that had never been done in the industry. You could feel the shift happening from all the major utilities across the U.S. that this was going to become standard practice.

But everybody was waiting for that first person to take the leap. This client, because of where they're situated and who their clients are, was the first to know they had to act. It was an opportunity to change the way we do design in our industry forever, and that only comes along once in your career. It was cool to get to create that.

PUF: You work on so many substation projects, and there's even a NERC CIP-014 on this, and you've got a big team. But how do you all work during this coronavirus crisis?

Keegan Odle: While a majority of our workforce has been instructed to work from home, Burns & McDonnell has always been focused on getting the work done wherever you are and whenever it needs to be done, as opposed to everybody sitting in an office. We're flexible on creating solutions wherever you are.

I put a video out to my team when we started working from home. I wanted everybody to know that Burns & McDonnell is not a building. It's not a structure. Burns & McDonnell is people. No matter where we are, our clients are going to depend on us to provide solutions and service.

They hire us to come up with creative ways to solve problems. This is another opportunity for us to continue to create innovative ways to solve problems. All you need is your brain, your laptop, and an internet connection, and we can do our job from wherever we are.

I keep checking in with all of our teams, and I keep asking, what are the hiccups, and what are the hurdles? I'm not going to say it's been perfect

But my main questions are, is work still coming in and are we still able to produce? As long as the answers are yes, we're fine. This is a part of the skillset we've created as a company. We can solve the problem from wherever we sit.

PUF: What led you to your current role?

Keegan Odle: I started as a design electrical engineer coming out of college. You prove yourself to be a good engineer, and then somebody asks you to lead projects for multiple people. 

When you get good at leading one team, they give you an opportunity to lead multiple teams. Then I became a project manager.

As you prove yourself by being good at something, being reliable, doing the right things and doing what needs to get done, you gradually work yourself up. Opportunities come along, and you have to make sure you take them.

The most important thing I tell people to do is be excellent at the job you have, and that will get you the opportunity to do the job you want. As long as you're doing excellent work, whatever you've been assigned to do, you'll get recognized.

I've had fantastic mentors that have helped me along the way. I believe in hard work. I believe in leading by example. 

PUF: You have an unusual story I saw in a video about your teenage years when you first had your encounter with electrical engineering. What was that effect?

Keegan Odle:  I grew up on a farm in North Central Kansas. A friend and I were leaving from a gathering literally out in a field, as ridiculous as that sounds. We came upon an accident where a kid had wrecked his car and slid off in the ditch, and he took out a twelve-kilovolt distribution pole.

My friend who was riding with me bailed out of the car to go see if the guy that had wrecked was injured, and he came in contact at that time with a live twelve-kilovolt line.

It lit the line on fire. He got the line trapped underneath his arm and the ground. I ran over to grab him to pull him off of it, and he was still live. It shocked me and threw me to the ground, and then I crawled over and grabbed him by the hoodie and pulled him off of it.

He had severe burns. It got me a night in the ICU, and it got two other kids, my friend and the driver of the wrecked car, in a burn center for months. 

It was one of those things where I had grown up being a farmer, and I was good at fixing things. We didn't have a rich farm. We had a farm that worked. You had to put the time in and figure out how to fix what you had. I thought, well, I'll be a mechanical engineer, up until this point.

But after that accident, I didn't understand it. I didn't know why things had happened the way they had. When I enrolled in Kansas State, I saw that they had a power option in electrical engineering. It would have been logical for me to go into mechanical engineering, but I couldn't get over the whole electrical component, and it drove me.

I talked to a couple of the professors and advisors, and thought, this is where I'm going to spend my career. I'm going to figure this out. Not everybody gets to have an origin story of something that drove them to where they are today. Fortunately, nobody died in that accident. But I wouldn't be in the power field had I not experienced that event.

PUF: What drives you to be involved with AABE and some of these other organizations?

Keegan Odle: When I started at Burns & McDonnell, Gabe Hernandez was my mentor. He was also my project manager. He's a vice president at Burns & McDonnell, and he instilled in me this mindset of, if you do good things, good things come back.

There's a concept here of giving back to your communities and doing more than the work you have. He said, everybody in this company is busy, but if you do good work out in the community, you'll find that to be more rewarding than any of the hours put in at the office.

Gabe also said, if you're going to be a part of something, you might as well lead it. He said, if you're going to join it, join it all the way and do it a hundred percent.

I wanted to get involved early on with mentoring and trying to drive STEM-related activities. We started the Engineering Explorers program, and that shifted to an ACE Mentors' program. Then other people took that on. A part of growth is getting out of the way of others. I've always tried to move to the next project to see where I can contribute again.

AABE was one of those where if you look around, typically in our industry, the black engineer is underrepresented. We do a good job of providing mentors for our young black engineers and technicians.

I felt like with AABE that is a place where I can provide impact and eventually be more of a sponsorship level than a mentorship level. Sponsorship is when you have somebody from an executive level that has taken an interest in somebody's career, and they want to help bring them along and answer questions and give them the insight on how to get to an executive opportunity.

I also believe that you can't effectively solve a problem with the same people from the same background with the same mindset. Diversity brings diversity of thought and mindset. If you want to get the best solution, you have to have people from a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints. 

PUF: What's next for you?

Keegan Odle: I'm focused on doing better at the job I've got. I'm hoping that eventually I'll be named an officer at Burns & McDonnell. From an outside perspective, I'd like to eventually chair the board for Sunflower House, which is a child advocacy center serving the communities around Kansas City, because I believe in the mission and what we're doing there. I want to take more leadership roles and help as much as I can.

Of the 64 rising stars, we selected eleven of them to highlight. These eleven exemplify the impressive record and pace of accomplishments of the best of our industry's next generation. The inspiring stories of Haben Goitom of Alliant Energy, Jennifer Wischnowsky of Ameren, Keegan Odle of Burns & McDonnell, Delevane Diaz of EPRI, Sean Meredith of Entergy, Illinois Commissioner Maria Bocanegra, Aaron Curtis of ITC, Ana Stachowiak of NYPA, Lisa Dailey of Northfork Electric Cooperative, Abbey Roy of Southern Company, and Brian Van Abel of Xcel Energy are told in part in the interviews that follow. These unique up-and-comers are already leading the industry's transformation and mission-critical groups within their organizations, in some cases as a COO, CFO or division VP.