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Some conversations stay with you long after the recording stops. My sit-down with Emad Al-Turk was one of those conversations.
I've known Emad for over 15 years now. We worked together at Kleinfelder from about 2010 to 2013, before I went on to establish ThinkPower Solutions. What I learned from him during that time — the importance of long-term relationship building in the selling cycle, the discipline of thinking beyond the next project to the next decade — became the cornerstone of everything I built at ThinkPower and now at KYRO AI. So when I say this episode is personal to me, I mean it.
But this isn't about me. This is about one of the most resilient, tenacious, and genuinely entrepreneurial people I've ever met.
Emad is a proud Palestinian. His father is from the Gaza Strip, and he still has family there today. He arrived in the United States in 1977 as a 17-year-old teenager on a scholarship from a Palestinian organization in Kuwait, with limited English and no safety net.
What struck me most was when he shared his father's guiding principle: "They can take your dignity away, but they cannot take your knowledge away."
That philosophy runs deep in Palestinian culture. Emad explained how Palestinian families, often with five, six, or seven children, operate on a powerful unwritten contract: the family struggles to send the eldest to college, and once that child graduates and starts working, it becomes their responsibility to educate their siblings — all the way down the line. The result is that Palestinians are among the most educated refugee populations in the world, producing doctors, engineers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs across every continent.
That culture of resilience and education shaped everything Emad went on to do.
When Emad earned his scholarship, he had a choice between England and the United States. He chose America because of what it represented to a teenager from the Middle East: a country of laws, a beacon of human rights, a place where the Constitution and Bill of Rights protected everyone equally. It's a reminder that the ideals this country was founded on still inspire people around the world — and that those of us who are here carry a responsibility to live up to them.
It was also at the University of Mississippi where Emad met Karen, his wife of over 44 years. After graduating in 1980, they moved to Kuwait together where he worked in construction. Three years later, Karen got homesick, and they came back to the States for good.
One detail I loved: when my family and I were visiting the Alhambra in Spain last summer, I texted Emad about it. He told me that's where he and Karen spent their honeymoon — because Spain was one of the few countries that recognized the Palestinian travel document. They couldn't go to Australia, New Zealand, or most other places. So they went to Spain, and it became one of their most cherished memories. It's a small story, but it says so much about navigating the world as a Palestinian.
Emad's career in Mississippi was strategic from the start. He took a position with the state's Department of Environmental Quality — not because he loved government work (he'll tell you he didn't), but because it gave him direct access to mayors, city council members, and county officials across the state. He was building a network with intention.
That network caught the eye of Joe Waggoner, founder of Waggoner Engineering, who brought Emad on as a project manager in 1988 when the firm had about 30 people. Within a couple of years, Emad was promoted to Vice President of Business Development — while still in his mid-twenties.
His approach to growing the firm was deceptively simple but profoundly effective. He never bashed the competition. He never walked into a meeting trying to steal a client from another firm. Instead, he asked one question: "What keeps you up at night?"
Then he solved it.
The secret weapon was something Emad learned from Joe Waggoner himself: helping clients figure out how to fund their infrastructure projects. When a municipality says, "We'd love to do this, but we only have budget for 30% of it," and you help them secure the rest? You're not just getting hired — you're becoming indispensable. The community gets better infrastructure, the elected officials look good in front of their constituents, and the firm grows. Everyone wins.
Waggoner also invested early in technology that nobody else had — they were among the first engineering firms to develop GIS in Mississippi in the late '80s, and they invested in one of the first LIDAR systems in the country. For a small firm, that kind of boldness was a massive differentiator.
By about age 30, Emad was the Chief Operating Officer, managing every aspect of the firm — finances, operations, business development, marketing — and had become the second-largest shareholder.
In 2003, Emad's life took a turn during an eight-hour drive from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan. He'd been in Iraq for funding discussions related to post-war reconstruction, and somewhere on that long desert road — with a security detail, not alone — his life flashed before him.
He realized his life was out of balance. He was focused on material success and business growth while his two daughters were growing up without enough of his time. He came home and submitted his resignation to Joe Waggoner.
Joe kept the letter in his desk for three months without telling anyone.
What I admire about this decision is that Emad didn't have a plan. He didn't have a competing offer. He simply knew that his priorities needed to change. Karen supported him completely — "Whatever you decide, I'm good with it" — and he stepped into a 15-year chapter of pure entrepreneurship.
What followed was a masterclass in entrepreneurial range. Emad ran two Marble Slab Creamery ice cream shops (Karen managed them — they were very successful and he sold them after about 10 years). He opened two restaurants (lesson learned: "I never want to be in the restaurant business again" — low margins, unreliable staffing, and a poor return on investment). He ran a consulting practice helping firms with strategic planning and growth. He co-founded the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, Mississippi — the first Islamic history and cultural museum in the country, which is celebrating 25 years in 2026. And he opened offices in Istanbul and Baghdad to help with Iraq's post-war reconstruction.
When I asked if there were lessons from that period, Emad was characteristically blunt about the restaurant business. But the ice cream shops? Those were a hit. The consulting? That kept him connected to the engineering world he loved. And the museum remains one of his proudest achievements.
In June 2016, Emad got a call from Joe Waggoner. "I need to have breakfast with you."
The story Joe told was painful. Waggoner had landed the program management contract for the entire state of Mississippi's Hurricane Katrina recovery — several billion dollars of work. It was a massive win. But the firm had diverted nearly all of its staff to that work and, in the process, ignored its other clients. When the Katrina money dried up after 10 years, they discovered their core business had shrunk by 40-50%. They were overstaffed, bleeding money, and Joe had been funding the company out of his own pocket for two years.
This is one of the most important lessons from our conversation, and it applies to every business owner listening: customer concentration is a silent killer. It feels great while the money flows. But there's always someone waking up every morning ready to take your neglected clients. It's easy to lose a customer and incredibly hard to win one back.
Joe asked Emad to come back as a turnaround consultant. Emad agreed — but with two non-negotiable conditions. First, Joe had to fire the sitting president and CEO before Emad walked in the door. Second, Joe would have zero veto power over any decision Emad made for six months. Joe revealed that the termination letters had already been sitting in his briefcase for four months — he just hadn't been able to pull the trigger.
This is a leadership lesson I talk about constantly: when you avoid making hard decisions about two or three people, you're being unfair to the 70 employees and their families who depend on the company surviving. Being a great engineer doesn't make you a great leader, and putting people in the wrong seats doesn't make them incompetent — it makes the decision-maker accountable.
Emad came in on a Monday, spent two weeks just listening — interviewing the top 30 people in the company, visiting old clients, understanding what had gone wrong. What he found was a culture of finger-pointing. Managers were blaming technicians for low utilization, when it was the managers' job to bring in the work in the first place.
He reorganized the company from 12 competing profit centers into one unified P&L. Seven of the twelve directors refused to get on board. He told them to have their resignations on his desk by the next morning. All seven were gone.
Then he did something that changed the trajectory of the company: he invested in technology. He moved everything to the cloud, enabled remote work, and modernized their systems. When COVID hit a year later, Waggoner didn't miss a beat.
He also implemented a quarterly bonus program tied to company performance. Employees could see the immediate fruits of their labor rather than waiting until the end of the year. He listened to the suggestions employees had been making for years that previous management had ignored — and he actually implemented them. People felt heard. People felt empowered.
By the end of the first quarter, Waggoner was profitable. By the end of the year, they distributed the first employee bonuses in two and a half years. And Emad was still technically a consultant.
The board eventually convinced him to become CEO — he hadn't wanted the job. By January 2017 he was CEO, and by January 2019, he was the majority owner. In two years, they'd grown revenue by 80% and were ranked in the top 90th percentile for performance nationally.
With the turnaround complete and momentum building, Emad and his leadership team set an ambitious goal: grow five-fold in five years, expanding regionally from Texas to Florida.
The question was how to finance it. Emad — a man who carries zero personal debt — wasn't comfortable with a debt-heavy approach. So he explored private equity partnerships, personally evaluating about a dozen firms, narrowing to six interested parties, then two finalists.
They chose Alpine Investors, a people-focused PE firm. The timing was perfect: Alpine was looking to enter the infrastructure space, and Waggoner became their very first deal. The partnership was finalized in January 2022, forming the Trilon Group platform.
Emad led Trilon's water and municipal platform as CEO, overseeing acquisitions in Louisiana, Arizona, and New Jersey. By the time he retired, the platform had nearly 800 people and was the 20th largest water engineering firm in the country. Trilon Group as a whole has since grown to a Top 20 engineering firm in North America in just three and a half years — acquiring roughly 36 companies along the way.
The growth has been nothing short of stunning.
Our conversation turned to the broader entrepreneurial landscape, and this is where Emad's perspective as both a business builder and an immigrant really shines.
The facts are striking: 99.9% of US companies are small businesses. They generate 44% of GDP and employ about 46% of the workforce. Yet the playing field is far from level. Small companies face crushing insurance costs, limited access to sophisticated tax planning, and regulatory burdens that large corporations can easily absorb or avoid entirely.
Emad's view is that the problem starts with national priorities. Sixty percent of the federal budget goes to four items: defense (now exceeding a trillion dollars), interest on debt, Social Security, and Medicare. Interest on the national debt alone is on track to surpass defense spending within three to five years.
His argument is straightforward: if small businesses thrive, they generate more tax revenue and their employees have more disposable income to fuel the economy. But we need to re-examine the incentive structure. Healthcare should be a right, not a burden that forces small business owners to choose between insuring their employees and staying solvent. Large corporations that pay zero in federal taxes while small business owners pay 40% on flow-through income — that imbalance has to be addressed.
I shared my own ideas on the show — a 50% tax reduction for employees at small businesses, better tax treatment for stock incentives — and Emad agreed that the spirit is right, but the systemic issues run deeper.
As an angel investor now active in AI and crypto, Emad sees artificial intelligence the same way he saw LIDAR 30 years ago: inevitable, transformative, and something you embrace rather than fight.
His advice to a 15-year-old entering the workforce? Get into AI, quantum mechanics, robotics, and coding. These are the fields that will define the next decade. And for engineering and construction firms specifically, his message is clear: companies that don't adopt AI will be "in the dust of history."
But he also offered a nuanced take. AI won't necessarily eliminate jobs — it will enable us to do dramatically more with the same staff. The same way LIDAR didn't eliminate surveyors but revolutionized what they could accomplish, AI will transform productivity across every industry.
If I had to distill Emad's story into a single lesson, it would be this: resilience is not just about surviving adversity — it's about using adversity as fuel for reinvention.
Emad has reinvented himself more times than most people attempt in a lifetime. From refugee to student, from state employee to engineering executive, from COO to entrepreneur, from ice cream shop owner to turnaround consultant, from CEO to PE dealmaker, from platform leader to angel investor. Each chapter built on the last. Each transition required courage, humility, and an unwavering belief in the power of relationships.
There's a verse from the Quran that Emad shared during our conversation: God created us from a single soul and into nations and tribes so that we may know each other and not despise each other. That philosophy — of genuine curiosity about people, of seeing diversity as enrichment rather than division — is the thread that runs through everything he's built.
Emad, thank you for your generosity, your friendship, and for showing all of us what's possible when resilience meets vision.
Listen to the full episode on From Boots to Boardroom.
From Boots to Boardroom is presented by KYRO AI — Digitize work and maximize profits.
Some conversations stay with you long after the recording stops. My sit-down with Emad Al-Turk was one of those conversations.
I've known Emad for over 15 years now. We worked together at Kleinfelder from about 2010 to 2013, before I went on to establish ThinkPower Solutions. What I learned from him during that time — the importance of long-term relationship building in the selling cycle, the discipline of thinking beyond the next project to the next decade — became the cornerstone of everything I built at ThinkPower and now at KYRO AI. So when I say this episode is personal to me, I mean it.
But this isn't about me. This is about one of the most resilient, tenacious, and genuinely entrepreneurial people I've ever met.
Emad is a proud Palestinian. His father is from the Gaza Strip, and he still has family there today. He arrived in the United States in 1977 as a 17-year-old teenager on a scholarship from a Palestinian organization in Kuwait, with limited English and no safety net.
What struck me most was when he shared his father's guiding principle: "They can take your dignity away, but they cannot take your knowledge away."
That philosophy runs deep in Palestinian culture. Emad explained how Palestinian families, often with five, six, or seven children, operate on a powerful unwritten contract: the family struggles to send the eldest to college, and once that child graduates and starts working, it becomes their responsibility to educate their siblings — all the way down the line. The result is that Palestinians are among the most educated refugee populations in the world, producing doctors, engineers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs across every continent.
That culture of resilience and education shaped everything Emad went on to do.
When Emad earned his scholarship, he had a choice between England and the United States. He chose America because of what it represented to a teenager from the Middle East: a country of laws, a beacon of human rights, a place where the Constitution and Bill of Rights protected everyone equally. It's a reminder that the ideals this country was founded on still inspire people around the world — and that those of us who are here carry a responsibility to live up to them.
It was also at the University of Mississippi where Emad met Karen, his wife of over 44 years. After graduating in 1980, they moved to Kuwait together where he worked in construction. Three years later, Karen got homesick, and they came back to the States for good.
One detail I loved: when my family and I were visiting the Alhambra in Spain last summer, I texted Emad about it. He told me that's where he and Karen spent their honeymoon — because Spain was one of the few countries that recognized the Palestinian travel document. They couldn't go to Australia, New Zealand, or most other places. So they went to Spain, and it became one of their most cherished memories. It's a small story, but it says so much about navigating the world as a Palestinian.
Emad's career in Mississippi was strategic from the start. He took a position with the state's Department of Environmental Quality — not because he loved government work (he'll tell you he didn't), but because it gave him direct access to mayors, city council members, and county officials across the state. He was building a network with intention.
That network caught the eye of Joe Waggoner, founder of Waggoner Engineering, who brought Emad on as a project manager in 1988 when the firm had about 30 people. Within a couple of years, Emad was promoted to Vice President of Business Development — while still in his mid-twenties.
His approach to growing the firm was deceptively simple but profoundly effective. He never bashed the competition. He never walked into a meeting trying to steal a client from another firm. Instead, he asked one question: "What keeps you up at night?"
Then he solved it.
The secret weapon was something Emad learned from Joe Waggoner himself: helping clients figure out how to fund their infrastructure projects. When a municipality says, "We'd love to do this, but we only have budget for 30% of it," and you help them secure the rest? You're not just getting hired — you're becoming indispensable. The community gets better infrastructure, the elected officials look good in front of their constituents, and the firm grows. Everyone wins.
Waggoner also invested early in technology that nobody else had — they were among the first engineering firms to develop GIS in Mississippi in the late '80s, and they invested in one of the first LIDAR systems in the country. For a small firm, that kind of boldness was a massive differentiator.
By about age 30, Emad was the Chief Operating Officer, managing every aspect of the firm — finances, operations, business development, marketing — and had become the second-largest shareholder.
In 2003, Emad's life took a turn during an eight-hour drive from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan. He'd been in Iraq for funding discussions related to post-war reconstruction, and somewhere on that long desert road — with a security detail, not alone — his life flashed before him.
He realized his life was out of balance. He was focused on material success and business growth while his two daughters were growing up without enough of his time. He came home and submitted his resignation to Joe Waggoner.
Joe kept the letter in his desk for three months without telling anyone.
What I admire about this decision is that Emad didn't have a plan. He didn't have a competing offer. He simply knew that his priorities needed to change. Karen supported him completely — "Whatever you decide, I'm good with it" — and he stepped into a 15-year chapter of pure entrepreneurship.
What followed was a masterclass in entrepreneurial range. Emad ran two Marble Slab Creamery ice cream shops (Karen managed them — they were very successful and he sold them after about 10 years). He opened two restaurants (lesson learned: "I never want to be in the restaurant business again" — low margins, unreliable staffing, and a poor return on investment). He ran a consulting practice helping firms with strategic planning and growth. He co-founded the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, Mississippi — the first Islamic history and cultural museum in the country, which is celebrating 25 years in 2026. And he opened offices in Istanbul and Baghdad to help with Iraq's post-war reconstruction.
When I asked if there were lessons from that period, Emad was characteristically blunt about the restaurant business. But the ice cream shops? Those were a hit. The consulting? That kept him connected to the engineering world he loved. And the museum remains one of his proudest achievements.
In June 2016, Emad got a call from Joe Waggoner. "I need to have breakfast with you."
The story Joe told was painful. Waggoner had landed the program management contract for the entire state of Mississippi's Hurricane Katrina recovery — several billion dollars of work. It was a massive win. But the firm had diverted nearly all of its staff to that work and, in the process, ignored its other clients. When the Katrina money dried up after 10 years, they discovered their core business had shrunk by 40-50%. They were overstaffed, bleeding money, and Joe had been funding the company out of his own pocket for two years.
This is one of the most important lessons from our conversation, and it applies to every business owner listening: customer concentration is a silent killer. It feels great while the money flows. But there's always someone waking up every morning ready to take your neglected clients. It's easy to lose a customer and incredibly hard to win one back.
Joe asked Emad to come back as a turnaround consultant. Emad agreed — but with two non-negotiable conditions. First, Joe had to fire the sitting president and CEO before Emad walked in the door. Second, Joe would have zero veto power over any decision Emad made for six months. Joe revealed that the termination letters had already been sitting in his briefcase for four months — he just hadn't been able to pull the trigger.
This is a leadership lesson I talk about constantly: when you avoid making hard decisions about two or three people, you're being unfair to the 70 employees and their families who depend on the company surviving. Being a great engineer doesn't make you a great leader, and putting people in the wrong seats doesn't make them incompetent — it makes the decision-maker accountable.
Emad came in on a Monday, spent two weeks just listening — interviewing the top 30 people in the company, visiting old clients, understanding what had gone wrong. What he found was a culture of finger-pointing. Managers were blaming technicians for low utilization, when it was the managers' job to bring in the work in the first place.
He reorganized the company from 12 competing profit centers into one unified P&L. Seven of the twelve directors refused to get on board. He told them to have their resignations on his desk by the next morning. All seven were gone.
Then he did something that changed the trajectory of the company: he invested in technology. He moved everything to the cloud, enabled remote work, and modernized their systems. When COVID hit a year later, Waggoner didn't miss a beat.
He also implemented a quarterly bonus program tied to company performance. Employees could see the immediate fruits of their labor rather than waiting until the end of the year. He listened to the suggestions employees had been making for years that previous management had ignored — and he actually implemented them. People felt heard. People felt empowered.
By the end of the first quarter, Waggoner was profitable. By the end of the year, they distributed the first employee bonuses in two and a half years. And Emad was still technically a consultant.
The board eventually convinced him to become CEO — he hadn't wanted the job. By January 2017 he was CEO, and by January 2019, he was the majority owner. In two years, they'd grown revenue by 80% and were ranked in the top 90th percentile for performance nationally.
With the turnaround complete and momentum building, Emad and his leadership team set an ambitious goal: grow five-fold in five years, expanding regionally from Texas to Florida.
The question was how to finance it. Emad — a man who carries zero personal debt — wasn't comfortable with a debt-heavy approach. So he explored private equity partnerships, personally evaluating about a dozen firms, narrowing to six interested parties, then two finalists.
They chose Alpine Investors, a people-focused PE firm. The timing was perfect: Alpine was looking to enter the infrastructure space, and Waggoner became their very first deal. The partnership was finalized in January 2022, forming the Trilon Group platform.
Emad led Trilon's water and municipal platform as CEO, overseeing acquisitions in Louisiana, Arizona, and New Jersey. By the time he retired, the platform had nearly 800 people and was the 20th largest water engineering firm in the country. Trilon Group as a whole has since grown to a Top 20 engineering firm in North America in just three and a half years — acquiring roughly 36 companies along the way.
The growth has been nothing short of stunning.
Our conversation turned to the broader entrepreneurial landscape, and this is where Emad's perspective as both a business builder and an immigrant really shines.
The facts are striking: 99.9% of US companies are small businesses. They generate 44% of GDP and employ about 46% of the workforce. Yet the playing field is far from level. Small companies face crushing insurance costs, limited access to sophisticated tax planning, and regulatory burdens that large corporations can easily absorb or avoid entirely.
Emad's view is that the problem starts with national priorities. Sixty percent of the federal budget goes to four items: defense (now exceeding a trillion dollars), interest on debt, Social Security, and Medicare. Interest on the national debt alone is on track to surpass defense spending within three to five years.
His argument is straightforward: if small businesses thrive, they generate more tax revenue and their employees have more disposable income to fuel the economy. But we need to re-examine the incentive structure. Healthcare should be a right, not a burden that forces small business owners to choose between insuring their employees and staying solvent. Large corporations that pay zero in federal taxes while small business owners pay 40% on flow-through income — that imbalance has to be addressed.
I shared my own ideas on the show — a 50% tax reduction for employees at small businesses, better tax treatment for stock incentives — and Emad agreed that the spirit is right, but the systemic issues run deeper.
As an angel investor now active in AI and crypto, Emad sees artificial intelligence the same way he saw LIDAR 30 years ago: inevitable, transformative, and something you embrace rather than fight.
His advice to a 15-year-old entering the workforce? Get into AI, quantum mechanics, robotics, and coding. These are the fields that will define the next decade. And for engineering and construction firms specifically, his message is clear: companies that don't adopt AI will be "in the dust of history."
But he also offered a nuanced take. AI won't necessarily eliminate jobs — it will enable us to do dramatically more with the same staff. The same way LIDAR didn't eliminate surveyors but revolutionized what they could accomplish, AI will transform productivity across every industry.
If I had to distill Emad's story into a single lesson, it would be this: resilience is not just about surviving adversity — it's about using adversity as fuel for reinvention.
Emad has reinvented himself more times than most people attempt in a lifetime. From refugee to student, from state employee to engineering executive, from COO to entrepreneur, from ice cream shop owner to turnaround consultant, from CEO to PE dealmaker, from platform leader to angel investor. Each chapter built on the last. Each transition required courage, humility, and an unwavering belief in the power of relationships.
There's a verse from the Quran that Emad shared during our conversation: God created us from a single soul and into nations and tribes so that we may know each other and not despise each other. That philosophy — of genuine curiosity about people, of seeing diversity as enrichment rather than division — is the thread that runs through everything he's built.
Emad, thank you for your generosity, your friendship, and for showing all of us what's possible when resilience meets vision.
Listen to the full episode on From Boots to Boardroom.
From Boots to Boardroom is presented by KYRO AI — Digitize work and maximize profits.
Hari Vasudevan, PE, is a serial entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI-driven solutions for utilities, construction, and storm response. As Founder and CEO of KYRO AI, he leads the development of AI-powered software that helps utility, vegetation, and field service teams digitize operations, improve storm response and restoration, and reduce operational risk. He also serves as Vice Chair and Strategic Advisor for the Edison Electric Institute’s Transmission Subject Area Committee and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering with professional engineering licensure in multiple states.
