To dress for success at Liberty Lake electrical engineering and consulting company H2E, engineers should be comfortable in work boots, says CEO Neil Heckerman.

H2E engineers have a different skill set when it comes to the common perception of electrical engineering, claims Heckerman, who cofounded the 17-year-old company with fellow Montana native Troy Pefley.

“Being an electrical engineer here doesn’t mean you’ll be sitting at a desk and designing chips,” he says. “Engineers from Montana like to wear boots and love to be out in the field designing things and making them work.”

H2E provides electrical engineering and design services for industrial clients, which include cement plants, metal manufacturers, mining concerns, and hydroelectric facilities.

“You have to have the ability to sit on a folding chair in a cold building, working with four guys behind you yelling obscenities,” Heckerman says.

Then, when the job is all said and done, H2E engineers are limited about what they can say they did, because most of H2E’s private industrial contracts require the company to sign nondisclosure agreements that remain in effect long after the work is complete.

Heckerman says H2E can provide prospective clients with references, but he can’t discuss much about specific jobs in detail or by name.

Heckerman claims H2E has established a reputation for helping clients make their operations and facilities safer, cleaner, and more productive.

“As emission and environmental regulations grow more restrictive, we’re able to help clients meet regulations through technology,” he says.

The company has three main engineering divisions: The power team oversees electrical and power aspects; the automation division manages programing and software development; and the design division creates drawings and plans for H2E systems.

The company occupies 12,700 square feet of space in a two-building complex at 23005 E. Knox. QualiTeq, a spinoff manufacturing company, occupies the connected 3,000 square foot building on the back side of the complex.

H2E designs automated systems, Heckerman explains, and QualiTeq, which was incorporated in 2011 and operates independently, shares some projects with H2E, including manufacturing controls for H2E systems.

Heckerman declines to disclose the company’s revenue but says H2E has grown by at least 25 percent annually most years. “It’s a real challenge to grow that fast,” he adds.

Heckerman says revenue spiked in 2014 with two big clients having enormous projects.

“We set all kinds of records that year,” he says. “

The staff ballooned in 2014 to 50 employees, including eight engineers, from 35 employees with six engineers a year earlier. The company also had to subcontract a lot of its work that year, Heckerman says.

“We didn’t want that kind of growth rate,” he asserts.

H2E dropped back down to a staff of 40 last year and grew from there at a more manageable rate, he says.

Today, the staff again is approaching 50, with eight engineers.

“We operate fiscally conservatively,” Heckerman says. “We’ve never carried any debt.”

Heckerman and Pefley met while students at Montana State University, in Bozeman, where they earned undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering.

They launched their engineering careers working in the nuclear division of Cranberry Township, Pa.-based Westinghouse Electric Co. While at Westinghouse, they both earned master of business administration degrees through Washington State University.

“We both worked with plutonium security, but knew that wasn’t going to be our long-term career path,” Heckerman says. “We both wanted to get closer to Montana.”

They each worked for a few other companies before joining to start their own endeavor in 1999.

While H2E was founded here, the company’s formal corporate name, Hungry Horse Engineering Inc., is a reference to the founders’ heritage.

Heckerman, who hails from Choteau, Mont., east of the Continental Divide, spent many days of his youth camping on the east side of Hungry Horse Reservoir.

H2E co-owner and principal engineer Pefley, who grew up in the Hot Springs area west of the Divide, camped on the west side of the reservoir in his youth.

While trying to come up with a name for the company, someone mentioned that they should camp together at Hungry Horse and think about it, Heckerman says.

That’s when Heckerman and Pefley settled on Hungry Horse Engineering, although they’ve used H2E as the assumed business name from the beginning.

Initially, they ran the business out of Heckerman’s home-based shop at Newman Lake, where they installed Internet cables and set up folding tables to accommodate H2E.

Early projects included designing robotic systems to remove spent nuclear reactor fuel from reactors, Heckerman says.

As H2E began to grow, the company brought on additional engineers starting with principal senior power engineer Mark Tiffany in 2001.

Since its early days, H2E has moved three times, outgrowing two other locations in Liberty Lake.

Now that it’s approaching capacity at its current location, Heckerman anticipates H2E will likely start setting up satellite shops closer to some of its clients. The first satellite offices likely will be in Colorado or Arizona, he says.

Only about 25 percent of H2E’s job sites are within three to four hours’ drive from Spokane. Another 10 to 20 percent are international, including some in South America, Africa, and Indonesia, Heckerman says.

The rest are scattered throughout the U.S.

“Our competition is not local,” he says. “It’s China and India. If we can help clients be successful, we can keep jobs here.”

The company has landed most of its clients through word-of-mouth references, or what Heckerman calls “rolling marketing” based on performance.

“We have a lot of MBAs here who have conversations with clients regarding their business models,” he says. “Eighty percent of our work isn’t bid; it’s just handed to us.”

Heckerman says about 15 percent of H2E’s work is acting as the clients’ agent to evaluate other contractors.

“We can deliver value without being the guys actually doing the work,” he says.

That doesn’t keep H2E consultants out of the field.

“We’re mostly country kids,” Heckerman says. “We like being out there, hand in hand with several contractors.”