The Skills Every Great Consultant Needs feat. David Aldrich ’15

[00:00]Brian Jackson: Welcome to Owl Have You Know, a podcast from Rice Business. This episode is part of our Flight Path series, where guests share their career journeys and stories of the Rice connections that got them where they are.

Today’s episode features David Aldrich, a Rice Business alum from the Professional MBA class of 2015. David serves on the Rice Business Alumni Association Board and is a practice lead at EPAM Systems, a management consulting firm where David focuses on energy. David’s path is anything but linear. He studied philosophy, started his career in sales and marketing at Houston startups, and then used his MBA to pivot into consulting.

Today, David has worked across industries, from energy to consumer sectors, helping organizations think more clearly about growth, operations, and strategy.

David also brings a unique perspective shaped by growing up abroad and spending time in international environments before building his career in Houston. In this conversation, we talk about that journey, what it really takes to be good at consulting, and some of the lessons David has learned from working with clients across different sectors.

We also get into how AI is showing up in his work today and where it’s actually creating value versus just hype. Well, David, first, I just want to thank you for joining me.

[01:16]David Aldrich: No, absolutely. It’s my pleasure, Brian. Really looking forward to it. Huge fan of the show.

[01:21]Brian Jackson: You’re one of the board members where I’ve gotten to, one, I met you, and we became fast friends, and then we were able to now serve on the Alumni Association Board together. When we first met, it was a Rice alumni event. I think it was the wine event, and we quickly realized that we have actually a lot in common.

One, we both have partners who are dentists. Your wife, Jasmine, is a dentist. My partner, Trace. Second, we both lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, and we attended Jakarta Intercultural School. And if I say Naga, Naga, Naga, you’re going to say...

[01:52]David Aldrich: Oi, Oi, Oi.

[01:55]Brian Jackson: So, the one question I always seem to get is, you know, looking back, how was growing up as an expat and becoming a third culture kid, how has it shaped who you are today?

[02:07]David Aldrich: I think it’s been probably the most impactful on my life. And when I think about growing up, from like zero to 18, those years in Indonesia and Jakarta are responsible for a lot of my worldview and a lot of my trajectory. I’m really thankful for that time I got to spend as an expat in Jakarta, and there’s a couple things that I think were really incredible.

One, just the age of being there when I was nine to about 15, right? Going from elementary school through middle school in Jakarta. And the second piece was what you mentioned, being an international school where, you know, Americans only made up about, I think, 30% of the demographic population of the school when I was there, from like 1992 to 1998. You were, kind of, a minority in this big mix of international students.

So, your friends were British kids, they were Korean kids, they were Filipino kids, they were Singaporean, they were from South Africa, they were from, you know, Qatar, they were from Australia. They were from all over the world. And getting exposed to just completely different cultures, completely different backgrounds, experiences, even mindsets, right, and how people think and play and collaborate and work together, really opened my eyes as to what’s possible, what’s out there, and, kind of, shaped a lot of my decisions from when I was even looking at where to go to school right after coming back to Houston for high school. It just completely shaped the way I thought about what I should do with myself and with my life.

[03:41]Brian Jackson: And so, when you came back to Houston, and then you’re thinking about college, because, what, you were freshman year, so, you know, sophomore, junior. How did you decide Colgate? Like, this is the right fit for you?

[03:52]David Aldrich: Well, the first decision I made was I wasn’t going to go anywhere in Texas after spending four years at Stratford High School. Shout out Stratford High School, SHS, is an amazing school, go Spartans. But I just saw a lot of my friends were going to, you know, UT, or Texas Tech, or A&M, or other private schools in Texas.

And I didn’t want to go to a school where I knew, you know, 20 or 30 people that I just spent the past four years with. I wanted to go somewhere where I didn’t really know anybody, and I wanted to go someplace that I hadn’t really been before and experience a different part of the United States.

And so, when I was applying to schools, I found out about Colgate, and which was about as far northeast as you could possibly go, in like the middle of nowhere, central New York. But I was also looking at schools in California. I was looking at schools on the East Coast. I was looking at schools, kind of, everywhere except Texas.

[04:45]Brian Jackson: And so, you were saying, you know, picking a place where there weren’t going to be Texans or high school classmates, it’s like you wanted to challenge your way of thinking and be challenged of who you are and continually learn. Is that why you fell into philosophy?

[05:01]David Aldrich: The reason I picked philosophy, I think a little bit of that, but also I wanted to be an attorney when I was in high school. So, I was a debate kid. One of the things that I did was debate, and I really wanted to go into law. And I thought, "Okay, what should best prepare me for a legal career and going to law school? Let’s study philosophy, and let’s study classical studies." So, I was taking a lot of Latin classes, classical studies classes, and philosophy classes while I was at Colgate.

[05:31]Brian Jackson: So, I mean, you wrapped up college and then somehow you end up in Houston. What brought you down to Houston?

[05:37]David Aldrich: So, my family had actually already left. So, when I was in college, my parents moved to Colorado, and then after that, they moved to South Africa. So, I wasn’t going back to where they were living at the moment.

By the time I got to senior year in college, I had decided I no longer wanted to be an attorney, so I wasn’t going to go to law school. So, now I was graduating, and I had a philosophy degree, and I decided I did not want to go to law school. So, I did what anyone does with a philosophy degree that does not go to law school. And I think that’s, you go into sales, right?

So, I found some opportunities in Houston for, kind of, sales-related roles, and I had grandparents that still lived in Houston, and so that was, kind of, my support network when I first got out of college and came back down to Houston.

[06:25]Brian Jackson: So, you’re working in sales roles, you inevitably get into the startup world, right? What were you working on, and what was that experience like?

[06:34]David Aldrich: Yeah. So, I was really fortunate. I knew I wanted to get into the digital space because this was back in, you know, 2010. Facebook had become a thing during, I think, when I was in college. And so, I saw the future of, you know, a lot of jobs were going to be in this digital space and world.

And so, at the time, it didn’t seem like there was a giant startup culture in Houston, but there was a pretty interesting startup company, tech company based out of Houston called FlightAware, which was a flight-tracking company, bootstrap startup. And I actually saw a position for, I think the title at the time was like Aviation Marketing Specialist. But that was a fancy word of saying, like, you’re going to be working in sales for our company.

I saw this job posting on Craigslist, if you can believe, I was, like, looking at Craigslist job postings back in, like, 2010, and I saw this opportunity. So, I started working there, and my job was basically to help them monetize the website. I mean, the company was essentially all software engineers and developers and a very small kind of commercial team, which was run by the COO, and I was reporting, kind of, directly into him, helping monetize all the advertising space we had on the website.

Also sell some of the other data products that FlightAware created, some other, kind of, bespoke products they offered into the aviation industry, but mostly around monetizing the site. So, that’s how I, kind of, got my start, like cold calling media planners who, like, worked for, you know, advertising agencies in New York and San Francisco and Detroit and Chicago, trying to convince them to place their advertising dollars for their clients on our website, flightaware.com.

[08:12]Brian Jackson: So, what did this whole period teach you? And I mean, you’ve carried it on to a management consulting career, what did, you know, working in a bootstrap startup, what has that translated into what you’re doing now?

[08:22]David Aldrich: Well, that time at FlightAware, and then also the time I spent at Rigzone and more of these kind of sales-focused positions, really taught me how to talk to people, develop relationships with people, find what’s going to be valuable for them long term, find solutions that are going to be win-win for both of us.

That, kind of, interacting with people on a daily basis and finding a common ground and where you can both provide value and wins together is something that I still do on a daily basis in consulting, right? So, I think a lot of that early time period, in, kind of, more, you know, cold-calling sales mode, prepared me for, you know, consulting later on, because consulting is also an interesting industry.

When you start, your focus is delivering, right? Your focus is, someone is telling you what to do on a project, and you’ve just got to deliver very well for, you know, your project lead and the client. As you progress in your career through consulting, now it becomes, it’s sales again, right? You’re responsible for managing relationships with clients, identifying opportunities that can add value to them, and, you know, you can deliver for, thereby selling your professional services. And it’s really back into mostly a sales job of trying to either respond to RFPs or, you know, finding opportunities and pitching them to clients.

[09:42]Brian Jackson: So, your MBA, what part did it play? Did it help you pivot into consulting, or was it a part of the grand pivot?

[09:49]David Aldrich: I mean, it was singularly responsible for how I was able to change my career from sales-focused roles into consulting, because at that time, in 2012, when I was applying to Rice to start in 2013, I mean, I had been in sales at that point for five to six years of, like, straight kind of sales-focused roles. And honestly, I was getting a little bit bored of the work that I was doing.

It was great, I was having fun, but it was having the exact same conversations. You could only sell advertising space for so long and talk about the size of, like, a banner that, you know, in a package or whatever, before you’re just selling the exact same thing again and again and again. And the conversations do get old.

While I was at Rigzone, I, kind of, got to do two things that opened my eyes up to what consulting could be. So, we implemented a new ad-serving system, which sounds really boring and awful, but it was an interesting change of pace for me, doing a kind of technology implementation project. We acquired another company and then had to come up with a new pricing catalog, sales strategy, had to roll that out to all these new salespeople that got, kind of, added to our company.

So, a lot of working on new process, working with people, training, transformation, so that was really exciting, too. And I realized I’d like to do more of these types of things versus continue to just sell the same thing again and again and again. But I knew that it would be very difficult for me to start just applying from where I was as, you know, a sales manager at an energy technology company, to go into a consulting shop. You really needed an MBA to do that. And so, Rice was the perfect avenue for me to make that pivot, to get my MBA, but then also position myself for consulting.

[11:36]Brian Jackson: Yeah, so the three letters definitely help in applying, but I’m curious, like, what specifically at Rice helped you actually prepare for the transition itself?

[11:46]David Aldrich: I mean, the whole reason I chose Rice was because I couldn’t make the economics work to quit my day job, right, and go and be a full-time student. I was married at the time, I had one kid, we had another kid coming on the way. So, I was like, "We can’t shut down this current revenue stream, we’re going to keep this going." So, I was looking for professional programs, and at the time, I think the two best programs that were available in Houston were, in my opinion, were, like, University of Texas’ program and Rice’s MBA.

And then when you compare those two options, it was like no question, Rice was the superior program in my mind, one, because you actually got to take classes on campus. You had access to the same classes that full-time students took as a, you know, evening professional student if you could make the schedule work. So, I took classes that were like full-time classes because I was able to come down during lunch on a Tuesday and a Thursday and make it work with my work schedule and take advantage of those classes.

I think, also, being able to take advantage of the clubs, right? The consulting club that does tremendous work at Rice University to prepare students for, you know, summer internships with consulting companies, but also for the case interviews and preparing for, you know, consulting interviews are pretty intense. Maybe they’re not as bad as private equity or some iBanking interviews, but they’re definitely not typically fun experiences to go through unless you’ve really, really prepped hard and know how to execute in them. And Rice does a great job of that.

So, having access to all those tools, all the professors, all the space, the people, the student population as a professional student at, kind of, Rice Business was the game-changer for me. 

[13:33]Brian Jackson: Yeah, no, I mean that access is so important. I think being involved in the student clubs, you’re absolutely right, that’s a differentiator. If you were to give advice to a first-year MBA who wants to break into consulting, what would you tell them?

[13:48]David Aldrich: I think my advice to students that want to go into consulting is you need to get really good at the AI piece, right? Study right now and get proficient with tools like Anthropic, tools like, you know, ChatGPT’s Codex, tools like, you know, Gemini’s Nano Banana, and, like, PaperBanana, the new one that they just announced. You have to be proficient in this space and be certified in this space, too. Like, Claude just announced a certification program. You can go get certified as, like, an Anthropic Claude architect. It’s free. You can do it.

Like, these are things that I think you need to have on your resume to position yourself for value, regardless of what strategy you take. If you want to go into strategy consulting or Big Four or technology, having those new skills on how to create agent capabilities for clients is going to be the table stakes to separating yourself from, I think, other people who are also looking to go into consulting.

[14:45]Brian Jackson: Yeah, that’s great advice. I’m going to transition a little here to talk about EPAM.

[14:50]David Aldrich: Sure.

[14:50]Brian Jackson: So, you’ve been at EPAM now for over six years, and like all of my friends in management consulting, I don’t really know what that means or what you do. So, what is it that you actually do on a day-to-day? What’s your focus?

[15:05]David Aldrich: Well, it’s changed a little bit. I started in 2019 as a senior manager. I’ve been working my way up to a principal, and then I just recently stepped into a managing principal role, and I run our energy management consulting practice.

So, a lot of my day-to-day is both talking to clients, but then also managing our pool of consultants and positioning them for projects and making sure that they’re being successful in the opportunities that they’re pitching to clients and the work that they’re delivering for clients as well.

What does that actually look like in reality? I think the best way to explain it, maybe to give you an idea, right? So, a year ago, we were working with an oil field services client, and the CEO was talking about how they wanted to expand what they’re doing in the digital space. Like, they have discrete software products, and they wanted to create transversal use cases so they could do something and solve problems for clients by leveraging the power of multiple pieces of their, kind of, software applications that are currently discrete and not integrated and, kind of, for very different purposes.

So, from there, we went, "Okay, let us help you organize those workshops to go find out what these transversal use cases are. So, that was phase one. Let’s bring everyone from across this global company into one room for a couple of days, people who are product managers for their different, discrete software solutions that this company owns, and let’s put them in the same room. Many of these people hadn’t even met each other or weren’t aware of the capabilities of some of the other, you know, software products this company produces. Let’s align on use cases. We found some, we had some great ideas. Okay, now let’s help you go validate that."

So, then we did basically a market assessment where we created mockups and UI designs for what this new software product could do. We validated that with the company’s own customers, like we worked with their commercial teams to set up time with their users and customers today.

We also went out and found people through our own network that were potential customers for our client. We validated it with, like, kind of, a market scan and looked at what other competing products are out there that could potentially compete with this new solution in the space. We did, kind of, pricing assessments, so we looked at, kind of, market size, what is even the total addressable market? Like, how much revenue could you hope to generate with a product like this? How would you price it?

How much is actually serviceable and addressable? Like, how much more revenue could you capture in year one versus year five? And then we presented that all back to, kind of, the leadership and said, "Okay, we think there really is something here. Here’s how we would price it, here’s how we would build it. Customers say they do want it, and they want these features."

And then we got to go build, like, the beta version of that product for them, which we highlighted at their annual meeting. And now we’re, like, in the process of making it real for customers. So, kind of full-cycle consulting, but also EPAM's focus is very much on product design, software engineering, going to make something real in the digital world, whether that's an application, whether that's a platform, whether that's a mobile app. That's, kind of, the space that we play in.

[18:05]Brian Jackson: Yeah, so from inception on that example you gave to, you know, final product, that’s a long time. It’s a two-year, three-year project?

[18:16]David Aldrich: So, this project, we’re about 12 months in from when we, kind of, first started the initial workshops. Taking this back to AI, what we’re able to do now in terms of mockup designs and potential solutions for customers, like, I no longer need a UX/UI design team to create a mockup of something that we want to deliver for a client. I can do that on my own with Claude Code or Codex and do something pretty good just using the new AI tools.

Now, I still definitely need the UI/UX teams to make this thing real, but of course, they’re also using AI-native, kind of, software engineering tools as well to speed this process up.

[18:53]Brian Jackson: How receptive are your clients when you bring in AI to projects? I mean, how, I guess, one, the question really is, like, how well do they understand it, and how much do they trust the output?

[19:05]David Aldrich: So, it’s becoming much more commonplace. Like every proposal that I’m seeing now, or even requests for proposals for clients, they’re asking us, how would you deliver this? Especially if it’s a software-related project where we’re building something digital, they’re asking us, how would you use AI to accelerate this work?

The energy industry, where I’m working, is, I think, a little bit slower to adopt versus, you know, the technology industry. Even the financial services insurance industry, consumer retail, for sure, is adopting this much quicker. But we’re seeing that our clients already, that they’re using their own development teams, are using, like, GitHub Copilot, or they’re implementing Claude Code, or they’re using the AI-powered kind of tools within Databricks.

They’re using the tools out there themselves, and they’re expecting their consulting partners and implementation partners to also use those same tools and speed up the velocity. Now, I will say, you can’t just give people access to these tools and be like, "Yay, it’s all going to work. It’s going to be great." There is definite governance that needs to be set up so you can train these agents and large language models on, you know, your own code libraries, your coding standards, the languages you use, you know, your CI/CD pipeline, how you deploy code, how you write test cases, how you test the code.

But you can have agents do like 90, 95% of that work. But it does need to be set up, and it does need strong governance to make sure what you’re building is actually what you want to build, right? And it’s secured from cybersecurity threats. You’re not adding new technical debt. You’re not mixing, kind of, languages that you shouldn’t be using. You’re building it for scale, and you’re following your organization’s, kind of, standards for how you build software.

[20:52]Brian Jackson: So, if I’m an energy executive who’s not an AI adopter, what am I missing?

[20:58]David Aldrich: You’re missing potentially so much productivity from your teams. Like, I’m thinking about anyone who’s still working in spreadsheets, anyone who’s still manually creating kind of PowerPoints, anyone who’s still, you know, manually creating the day-to-day things that all companies run on is missing out if you’re not asking your employees to become proficient and start adopting AI software.

Now, at the same time, there’s an interesting question that’s going on right now, which is, "Okay, we all know what the cost of large language models and tokens and agents, we all know what that costs right now, but we also have never known a technology company to, kind of, keep prices the same for the next five, 10 years. Like, everyone knows, and you’ve already seen that from like ChatGPT to Claude, like, there’s the free version now, there’s the premium version, now there’s like the max version that you pay for." It’s not going to stay this price. It’s going to get more expensive. Energy is going to become more expensive, right, to power all of this.

There is a question of how much do you completely start re-architecting your workflows to rely on agents if there’s some projections that show the cost for support, like the cost per ticket resolution, is projected to be, by, this is, someone was posting this on LinkedIn the other day, as projected to be $3 in 2030 by using agents. And $3 per ticket resolution is pretty close to what we pay for humans in offshore managed services locations to resolve tickets.

So, at what point is it going to become more expensive than actual humans? Again, I don’t think you should stop AI adoption because of that potential, but I think it’s important to understand that there’s things that you can do right now to enhance productivity by using these tool sets. There’s other things that require, I think, a little bit more due diligence, and is it the right decision to completely re-architect the way we work with agents? Because what’s good for Anthropic and how they code might not be the best thing for your company long term.

[23:07]Brian Jackson: Yeah, that’s so interesting. So, I guess having stepped into a new leadership role in energy, how has that position changed your perspective of the work that you’re doing and how the team operates and interacts with clients?

[23:22]David Aldrich: I will say that I am extremely fortunate at EPAM to be working for Clark Varner, who’s also a Jones School alumni. He was a Rice MBA. I’ve been working with him for over 10 years now.

So, he was at North Highland, which was the first firm I started working for after Rice, after I got my MBA. And then he’s at EPAM, where I’m working right now. And so, when I started as a senior manager here at EPAM, he led our energy, kind of, consulting practice here in Houston. And then he basically took on a new role, a new leadership role, and he now leads our entire energy business unit because, obviously, we do a lot more than just consulting, we do software engineering, we do product development, we do product design. We have, you know, account management professionals who run and manage specific energy accounts for us.

And so, Clark looks after all of that work. I say all this to give context that I’m not doing this by myself. There’s a team of people that I have grown up with, both at my time in North Highland and now at EPAM, that are also in really senior leadership roles that I work closely with every single day.

So, when you ask, how does it change my perspective on managing a team and being in a leadership position, I think the perspective doesn’t change that much is that, number one, is you’ve got to look out for your people, right? People need to be in an environment where they feel safe, where they feel supported, where they feel they can come with questions, with concerns, where they can go get guidance that’s, you know, judgment-free. That’s what I’m hoping to provide and give everyone that space where they can thrive and do their best work and really enjoy, as much as possible, the day-in and day-out work that they’re doing for clients and for EPAM.

[25:04]Brian Jackson: That’s great. I mean, that psychological safety of being able to, kind of, check your ego at the door and just say, "Hey, I have no idea. How would you do this?" tends to create some of the best responses, I feel like, and actually creates opportunity to solve things. So, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen good consultants, and you’ve seen bad consultants. What separates a good consultant?

[25:26]David Aldrich: Yeah, I think a good consultant is not afraid to ask questions, to push clients, and, kind of, challenge thinking. I think there’s an art to being able to do that without offending and pissing clients off, and understanding when you have the opportunity to, kind of, push hard to get clients thinking in a different way.

I think the other key part is being able to be hungry for any opportunity and not scared to learn any new topic, right? Because the nature of consulting is that you’re being thrown into a bunch of different businesses, and no matter how much you’ve worked in a specific industry or at, like, businesses, there’s always going to be something new that they’re doing, whether it’s from a technology that they’re using, a process that they’re following, the nomenclature that they’re using.

So, you always got to be hungry and excited to learn more, and never, kind of, turned off and scared about having to, you know, master a new subject where you know nothing about it. So, always being hungry to learn quickly and adapt. And I think always coming with potential solutions versus constant questions.

So, questions are great when you’re trying to understand what’s the context, but we need to move very quickly to offering a point of view on what you need to be doing. And so, I always tell new consultants that are starting, "What are the best behaviors you can develop?" When you spot an opportunity, you know, for where you can add value or we can add value for our client, don’t just come to your manager or your principal or the project lead or client lead and say, "Hey, I think there’s an opportunity here." It’s, "Hey, I think there’s an opportunity here, and here’s how we propose we go solve it. And here’s the approach that I think we should take, and here’s how I would think we... This is the team size I think we would need to do it, and here’s the timeline." Like, come with a fully baked plan. That’s the behavior that we love to see from a great consultant.

[27:08]Brian Jackson: Yeah. Has there been a time where you’ve brought forth a fully baked plan, and the instant reaction was no? Like, "David, no. This doesn’t make sense."

[27:17]David Aldrich: All the time, yes. That definitely does happen. It’s something you also have to get used to is rejection, right? There’s no way in consulting that when you spot an opportunity and a way to add value, that you’re going to have, you know, 100% batting average. It’s just not going to happen.

You’re going to pitch a bunch of things, and you might think it is, of course, the best solution out there. You would be crazy if you picked any other vendor or any other SI or consultancy to go do this work. And, of course, that happens all the time, they pick someone else. So, you just have to be comfortable, right, and rejection, not take it personal, and you keep going, right? Look for the next opportunity.

[27:56]Brian Jackson: With EPAM's operations being global, you know, how has the conflict in Ukraine impacted you in your work?

[28:04]David Aldrich: Yeah, that continuing conflict has been the biggest shock our company has ever experienced in its 30-year history. So, for people that may not be aware, EPAM is 30 years old. We’re about 65,000 people. We started as a company that was providing technology solutions mainly from Europe, in locations like Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, because we had highly skilled software development professionals that were based there that were still really cost-competitive with other kind of offshore delivery centers around the world that other consulting companies were using.

And we found the talent there was really second to none, and again, the economics made a lot of sense to our clients. And so, we, kind of, built our company around these delivery centers in Eastern Europe. And so, by the time we got to 2022, we were a, you know, 55,000-60,000-person company, and we had 30,000 people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

And then the conflict started, and we immediately, of course, shut down all of the work that we were doing with companies in Russia. And then we made the decision very quickly to say, "Okay, if you want to work for EPAM, you cannot be in Russia, you have to leave Russia." And, of course, we had many employees that wanted to also leave conflict zones in Ukraine. And we also had people who wanted to leave Belarus as well.

And so, during 2022, 2023, EPAM was relocating like 5,000, 6,000 employees and their families, like, constantly. So, there was a mass move of people across the globe to get people into environments where they felt safe and were able to thrive, and their families were able to thrive.

And it’s still happening today, right? I think people tune out the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but that’s still an active war that’s happening. And we still have 9,000 professionals operating in Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, all across Ukraine, delivering every day for our clients. And it’s amazing the resiliency of some of my colleagues that are, you know, again, like going through ballistic missile drills, warning sirens on a frequent basis, having to deal with power outages, gas outages constantly.

I mean, they’re real heroes, right, of EPAM, and still coming to work with fantastic, positive attitudes, ready to excite, delight customers, go build something new, continuing to learn. So, it’s one of the reasons I’m really proud to work at EPAM, is not only how our company has responded, but just the culture and the community we have built around our colleagues and what we do for our clients every day.

[30:42]Brian Jackson: I think of it, and, you know, you were saying they still show up, they’re excited to be there and deliver product, like, one, how almost, like, empowering that is to your own spirit, to sit there with folks and to be like, "Okay, if they can do it, I can do it. We’re going to do it as a team." And then secondary, I think of, is it hard, though, to be on team calls and have your, you know, colleagues and friends in areas that are dangerous and have danger around them? You know, how do you, kind of, manage those feelings?

[31:13]David Aldrich: I’ll tell you, it’s not easy. I’ll be extremely frank. I was doing a project, this was back in 2022, one of our developers on our team, his name’s Andre, fantastic guy. He was based in Kharkiv, and if you don’t know where that is, it’s, kind of, on the eastern side of Ukraine, very close to the border with Russia.

And so, during the start of the invasion, Russia was coming really close into Kharkiv, they were throwing shells, they were throwing mortars into the city. EPAM was doing its best to try to evacuate as many people as we could, like, basically sending buses into the city. But you couldn’t safely go walk around the city.

And so, where his apartment block was, he could not get to where the buses were picking people up. And, you know, he has a small family, he had two small daughters. So, their first solution was to go sleep in the, kind of, subway stations, right, to protect them from mortar fire, shell fire. But it was middle of winter, it’s freezing down there, so people were getting sick, that’s not a solution. So, they went back to their apartment.

The train station wasn’t running on schedule, so that was also not an option. Because I was trying to brainstorm this through, like, you know, "Andre, we’ve got to get you, we’ve got to get you out of here. We’ve got to get you safe. What can we do?" He was saying, "No, we can’t use the train station. There’s like 10,000 people there just waiting for the next train. It’s not safe."

He was finally able to get a car rental with a friend, but there was not enough space in the car for both him, his wife, and his two kids, just his wife and his kids. So, he puts his wife and kids in the car, he sends them towards Zaporizhzhia, which was safe at the time, and he walks out of the city, like 20, 25 kilometers, until he gets to a point where it’s safe enough for him to be picked up.

And so, each day I was asking, like, "Andre, are you going to be safe? Are you going to be okay? What’s going on?" That, you know, takes a mental toll on you because you’re just worried sick for these people that you come to know and work with on a daily basis. So yeah, it’s mentally taxing, but you just got to remember that that mental struggle from my end is nothing compared to, you know, what my colleagues are going through. And it just makes you super thankful to be working with amazing people and in a community that, kind of, EPAM created, community and culture that EPAM created.

[33:27]Brian Jackson: It’s great to be on a team and to support a team like that, David. I’m going to pivot a little, because I know some of the stuff you do outside of work, but I’m curious if there’s something outside of work that’s made you better at your job.

[33:39]David Aldrich: I think being involved with kids’ school sports stuff gives you a lot of, let’s say, a lot of patience. It teaches you patience in ways that you weren’t expecting, that you can take to clients.

But I’ll also say, I’ll be very honest, I tell everyone on our team, like, "Listen, there’s a reason you get paid time off. You should take it, and you shouldn’t be working during that time." I’m always a bad example. I do tend to, like, check my phone and check my computer when I’m supposed to be off. But I tell people, "Please don’t follow my awful example. You should take time off."

And I think that is really important. I purposely try to take the time off that I’m given by, you know, EPAM each year and go travel, go experience something completely different, and share it with my kids as well, right? And I think that has always refreshed me, made me excited to come back to work.

Traveling and being someplace new, foreign, uncomfortable, it sparks, again, that creative thinking. It gets your brain moving, and it creates ideas that, I’m often coming back to work excited and thinking about something new I want to try after being on vacation, and especially being on vacation in someplace completely random and new that I’d never been before.

Now, I’m not saying I don’t like to also just go somewhere like a beach resort pool where someone can just bring me, you know, margaritas or piña coladas, I enjoy that, too, but I think you need to balance both.

[35:06]Brian Jackson: I tend to be on that type of vacation. One other thing that you do, you stay really involved with Rice, especially Rice Business. At what point did you shift from Rice just being your school to really, I think, becoming your community?

[35:21]David Aldrich: You know, I think my grandfather, you know, he taught me that. And it was something that Shawn Sullivan, the CEO at FlightAware, who is a big Colgate supporter, told me as well, that, like, "Listen, if you enjoyed your experience at your alma mater, you should give back. You should always give back as much as you can." And the experience that I had both at Colgate and at Rice was life-changing for me, career-changing in terms of my MBA. And so, I’ve always wanted to give back financially as much as I can and support students who also want to go to that school, right? Be a class ambassador for Rice, try to keep my class involved and aware of what’s going on at school, try to bring them back to campus, promote reunion, and try to get a big turnout as much as possible.

And then now, you know, finding new ways to serve the alumni community and do more to encourage alumni to come back, engage, and participate with Rice. We can continue to grow, I think, this amazing alumni network that we have, which is now like 10,000 people who’ve matriculated and graduated through the Rice Business MBA program.

[36:24]Brian Jackson: Yeah, and one of the things, I mean, the Alumni Association Board is all about how do we reengage and get people to stay in touch and connected to Rice Business. One of the things we’ve been working on together was the alumni breakfast series. I’d love you to just talk about it and share why we thought that that was a value add and a new connection point for alumni.

[36:46]David Aldrich: Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s one of the things that I have been super excited about since joining the board, is this new series. We realized that getting to events on campus can be difficult, given the size of Houston and the sprawl and the fact that we have people coming from, if they want to come to events, they’ve got to be coming from Katy, West Houston, they’re coming from Sugar Land, Richmond, Southwest Houston, they’re coming from, you know, Spring, The Woodlands, they’re coming from Humble, Atascocita, they're coming from everywhere.

And it’s not easy sometimes to leave work at like 4:30 just so you can be on campus at 6:00 for an event that starts. And so, we thought about what programming options can we offer so that we’re not only having programming that is available to alumni and students after work, but before work, right? Or during the early morning part of work.

So, you can come in, you can have breakfast, you can have coffee, you can engage with Rice and then make it back to work. And then everyone’s busy after work as well with, you know, family activities, et cetera, so we can leave that open. So, we wanted to be able to provide both options to our alumni and students, and even the broader Houston community, to come and engage in whichever way works best for you.

If it works best for you to come and participate in a really interesting panel after work’s done and stop by the campus after, then great. If it’s better for you to come during the morning and break bread and have coffee with alumni and colleagues and friends, then let’s do that as well and make that available to our alumni community.

[38:17]Brian Jackson: That’s great, and that was absolutely the purpose.

David, this has been such a unique episode, and I really have appreciated your time, and we get to draw on some of these shared commonalities we have. And I’ve always really enjoyed your service on the board and working together, so thank you.

[38:34]David Aldrich: No, thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure. I love the work that you’re doing on this podcast. I think it’s extremely valuable to not only our alumni, but just Houston in general, and students and everyone, kind of, to see the trajectories and career paths that are available to them and some of the amazing work that our alumni are doing, both here in Houston and Texas across the globe.

I think you’re doing a fantastic job. I’m so happy to be on here. I feel honored to be invited to the Owl Have You Know podcast, and I hope it’s not the last time we have a conversation like this.

[39:04]Brian Jackson: No, no, it won’t be. Well, thanks again, David.

[39:07]David Aldrich: No, thank you, Brian.

[39:14]Brian Jackson: Thanks for listening. This has been Owl Have You Know, a production of Rice Business. You can find more information about our guests, hosts, and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you find your favorite podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. The hosts of Owl Have You Know are myself, Brian Jackson, and Maya Pomroy.