Working in a male dominated field hasn’t stopped civil engineer

Amanda Musy-Verdel

By Kelly Barbazette

Kelly Barbazette

Amanda Musy-Verdel has learned to be comfortable being the only woman in the room. Throughout her career, she has led with integrity and prioritizing her clients’ needs in the male-dominated field of civil engineering.

“For me, when I first started working, I would meet with clients,” she said. “And they would say I wasn’t an engineer and when I told them I was, they would say, ‘You don’t look like one.’ And I would ask ‘What does an engineer look like?’”

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Musy-Verdel, P.E., QSD, about what it has been like to own Hanna-Burnetti, the 111-year-old Gilroy civil engineering and land surveying company where she launched her career 19 years ago and her pull towards engineering at an early age.

Born and raised in Salinas, Musy-Verdel, 43, can trace her interest in engineering to the words of a Cisco computer engineer at her high school’s career day when she was a senior.

“He said engineering is like solving problems,” she said.

Puzzles and problem-solving have always appealed to her, so when it came time to select a major at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo she chose bioresource and agricultural engineering. She graduated in 2002, earning her bachelor of science degree, shortly after 9/11 when the unemployment rate began to climb and thousands of jobs were being eliminated.

While most of her peers were going onto graduate schools, she was offered two jobs — one in Fresno and one at Hanna-Brunetti, which was founded by Gilroyan Walter Hanna in 1910. Hanna’s son, Walter Hanna, Jr. took over the company after his dad’s death and partnered with Arnold Brunetti. Hanna Jr. died in 2009.

Musy-Verdel accepted Hanna-Brunetti’s offer. In the beginning, she did “whatever they told me to do,” she said, laughing. “Mostly grading and drainage projects.”

The firm handles general civil engineer work for civil, residential, and commercial development in Santa Clara, Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties. It employs about a dozen people — a mix of civil engineers, land surveyors, and construction managers. During her second year after being hired, the economy started to improve and the company began taking on more projects. Her third year, she was in charge of designing an extensive renovation of Mountain Winery in Saratoga.

“What I have liked about working here was I was able to advance faster and the negotiations with the planning departments and engineering – working through and finding out the problems and finding solutions and all of the friendships along the way,” she said.

Working with a client on a project — something as small as helping them build an accessory unit in their backyard — and developing relationships in a business that is largely shaped by referrals, are favorite parts of her job.

“That’s something that is rewarding to me when I form a relationship with someone and see how that’s grown,” she said. “A lot of architects I work with have been for the past 20 years. They say that they want to work with me. That’s very rewarding.”

Musy-Verdel never imagined ever owning the company until a former sister company of the business floated the question. She talked it over with her family before deciding to make the leap. In 2016, she approached Arnold Brunetti, who was 81, if he would be willing to sell the company. He agreed.

“The same week my son was diagnosed with autism and then five weeks later, Arnold passed,” she said.

There was a lot of crying that week as she faced each new transition. “I probably made a ton of mistakes at the beginning. But you look back and see that you made it through.”

She has repeatedly learned to trust her gut instinct and the realization that things eventually do work out.

“I rebuilt the company with the amazing people who work here now,” she said. “Looking back it was all good. It was horrible at the time. But the company is getting better and better every year.”

She credits her success to the support of her husband and the rest of her family. The company takes on about 100 new projects each year. The pandemic was a particularly challenging time. She will never forget the day in March 2020 closing the business, not knowing when it would be able to reopen.

While the company had a backlog of projects to sustain itself for two months, there was a lot of uncertainty. Musy-Verdel quickly learned how to do payroll and set up employees to work from home. In the meantime, construction came to a standstill. Finally, many weeks later, she learned the company’s PPP loan — a Small Business Administration-backed loan that helped businesses keep their workforce employed during COVID-19 — was awarded.

“I literally broke down because a stress had been lifted off,” she said.

Construction started up again in May 2020 and “hordes of people came out of the woodwork wanting to do projects,”  she said. While the company never required anyone to come back to the office, eventually everyone did. “We’re all here,” she said. “We made it here.”

One of the most challenging but important parts of her job is to continue to have integrity and own mistakes.

“It’s so easy to blame someone else or not take accountability for mistakes,” she said.

She recalls a time when someone on her staff inverted a number, altering a project, and Musy-Verdel called their client and took responsibility for the error.

“When it was time for them to find a new engineer for extra work, they told a person in their corporate office this is who you have to use,” she said, referring to her company. “It’s a hard phone call to make. It sucks at the time, but it pays off. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does you have to work through it.”

Musy-Verdel doesn’t count herself among small business owners who hope to continue working until they die. She hopes to gradually taper off her involvement in the company and retire — likely closer to age 60.

“I do want to retire. I don’t know what I want to do,” she said. “I do know that I want to get more involved in education because of my son — or at least help with advocacy.”

She and her husband of 14 years moved to Gilroy 10 years ago from Salinas. Their son is 11 and they also have an 8-year-old daughter. When she’s not working, she enjoys tending to her vegetable garden and orchids, exercising, taking walks, and reading.

When asked what advice she would give to women pursuing their goals, Musy-Verdel recalls being one of a handful of female students in the engineering program at her college and feeling unprepared. The challenges caused her to dig into the material, meet with her teachers, and ask questions.

“You really need to block out people, and make sure you find out what you need to know and not worry about anyone else, and keep going,” she said.

Kelly Barbazette, a former journalist for Bay Area newspapers, is a freelance writer. She lives in Gilroy with her husband and two daughters. She can be reached at [email protected].