Meet Claudio Gutierrez

We recently connected with Claudio Gutierrez and have shared our conversation below.

Claudio, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?
Mostly from observing the world around me. I’m a life-long student of history and there’s no denying that things are better now than they were a thousand years ago.

Sure, some events such as wars and famines may make us think that we’re heading in the wrong direction but overall, the world is getting better.

And this is not just an observation about history or the world at large. The same can be said of our more immediate surroundings and our interactions with others.

So being able to recognize this, I like to apply myself to becoming a more excellent person as time goes on. I like to invest in myself, develop my talents, and increase my impact on those around me for the better. This mindset is what makes me an optimist through and through.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m the founder and of a project management firm named Valens Project Consulting. We specialize in operational improvements and managing projects for companies that don’t have their own in-house project managers or engineers. We originally focused mainly on small manufacturers and industrial distributors but we’ve since expanded our target client base to include major corporations in the oil and gas and medical device fields.

We realized that many big name companies assign project management duties to an engineer that already has engineering duties, so the result is subpar project management and subpar engineering. By showing them how investing in proper project management upfront can save them hundreds of thousands down the road, we now count on some household names as our clients.

We like to pride ourselves in our fast response time and reasonable pricing, but most importantly in instilling a culture of continuous improvement in the companies that we service. For that reason, I’ve written a book that will hit the market in early 2024 and we’re developing a project management course that will come out by the middle of 2024. That way we can teach companies how to fish, instead of fishing for them, sort to speak.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think that humility and perseverance are a couple of qualities that I’ve developed over the years, but the biggest factor in the development of Valens was the fact that I’m naturally hyper-curious. I like to know what’s going on in various industries, how things get done, and how they can be improved.

One of my partners in improvement projects, Mike Carnell, was one of the original developers of Six Sigma and he told me that he and his Motorola colleagues would collect all the data they could get their hands on about every process they could, Even though they didn’t exactly know why.

When they started developing the Six Sigma tools, they already had everything they needed to test their theories and apply them to other situations.

That mentality resonates strongly with me because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so we’re also always taking many measurements and metrics that we later use to improve a company’s operations.

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
Our ideal client is a company that is ambitious enough to want to grow or improve their operations, but humble enough to realize that they don’t know everything and that there are ideas that can only be discovered by getting a new pair of eyeballs to look at their operations.

It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised at how many companies have the proverbial blinders on and do things the way they do because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.

That mentality is quite dangerous in the current business environment, where even the slightest advantage has the potential to make or break companies. I like to tell our clients that “if you’re not improving, you’re falling behind.”

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