Shannon Magari is one of four principals in Colden Corp., a consulting company that solves vexing problems, often on the bleeding edge of science and technology.

"People don't call us with easy problems." Magari said. "If the problems were easy, they would have sorted them out already."

Magari's office is in DeWitt, but she frequently travels coast to coast and around the world.

Last month, she was answering a call from the king of Saudi Arabia. This week, it could be an environmental emergency on the West Coast, another new factory installation in Japan, or a concern on the frontiers of nanomaterial.

Were you in leadership roles growing up?

No. I am the youngest of four so I got all the scut work. My brothers and sister taught me humility.

We grew up in Baldwinsville. My parents were small business owners, so I grew up with that entrepreneurial spirit.

What kind of small business?

Sunoco stations, and they had an auto body repair shop and a racing chassis building business. I think that's probably why we all ended up as engineers.

Have you ever seen the super modifieds race up in Oswego? They're really cool. We used to build those, and we had a car and a team to race those. It was fun.

Some of my earliest memories are working at my parents' gas stations. People used to write checks for their gas, and I distinctly remember my mother routinely giving me, at no more than 6 or 7, piles of checks so that I could fill out the deposit tickets.

She would look at me and say, "It has to be perfect, I know you can do it."

There's something powerful in someone you have the utmost respect for, your leader, expecting the best from you.

My mother has a couple constant refrains, but one of them is: "Children will give you exactly what you expect of them. So be careful what you expect of them."

Give me the elevator speech about Colden.

We are an occupational environmental health and safety consulting firm. We've been in business since 1997. We are headquartered in Philadelphia, but we have major offices in Albany, Syracuse, Erie, New York City and the New England area -- Worcester. And satellite stations for our clients. We'll take a Colden person and put them at the client site permanently to integrate into their health and safety group.

We work in heavy industry, light industry, we work in academia. We work in office settings. We do a lot of OSHA compliance work, so we'll monitor air and water quality. We will provide litigation support when groups of folks are sick or have died. I like to say that we help to figure out why people get sick at work -- not sick of work.



We work for a lot of Fortune 500, 100 companies, coast to coast and internationally.

We have four principal owners, so there are four partners, equal partnership.

How many employees does Colden have?

We have 50 full-time employees. We have a cadre of really good long-term sub-consultants that we use on a contract basis.

We're a service-based organization, so we have to maintain fantastic relationship with our employees, with our sub-consultants, with our clients. We've built this network over the years that's pretty powerful, and our clients call us with the craziest requests: "Do you know a Japanese speaking, certified industrial hygienist with 30 years of experience in the chemical industry?"

Three phone calls later, yes, in fact we do. So we sent someone to Japan for six months to open a plant safely. You only get that by doing a good job and being out there fostering those partnerships.

What advice do you have for overcoming obstacles and setbacks?

I would advise folks to stop calling them obstacles and setbacks. If the attitude is always gratitude, then you can truly learn to be grateful for the challenges.

OK, it isn't a setback. It isn't an obstacle.

It's a challenge. Sometimes they're technical challenges. Sometimes, they're logistical challenges.

During the heat wave last summer, we had a client, a Fortune 100 client, who has to operate tunnel kilns around the country. Heat stress is pretty important.

They called on a Friday, knowing the weather pattern for the next week. They said: "Can you get an industrial hygienist to each of these nine sites next week to monitor for heat stress during the heat wave?" So by Friday afternoon, I'd bought nine tickets. I'm walking around the office: "I got St. Louis to offer. Anyone want to go to Paris, Texas?"

The situations can be funny, very serious, very sad. There's a significant emotional component -- you're dealing with people and their health and safety.

I serve as child actor advocate for a major network television division. Nobody's ever thought that all of our health and safety regulations are for healthy 35-year-old working males. Nobody thinks about child actor health and safety.

It seems like every industry is going through change because of challenging economics or the rise of the digital age. How do you go about changing an organization and its culture to succeed in a new environment?

You change culture by hiring people who embrace change. Some people out there don't embrace change. They want everything to stay the same. I can't have teammates like that.

Our folks want to learn about something new. They want to learn about nanomaterials' health and safety. They want to learn about infra noise and the equipment that's required. They want to learn about the health and safety aspects of hydrofracking.

They're people that didn't want anything to stay the same. That's what works for us.

The king of Saudi Arabia called last week. Through his contacts -- we've worked in Saudi Arabia for some of the facilities management folks before -- they really need help with MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

They needed -- it's a like a bad joke -- they needed an epidemiologist, an industrial hygienist, an infectious disease doctor.

So yeah, you better have people who are pretty curious and pretty flexible.

How has the digital world -- the ability to communicate and have distributed information -- how has that changed your work?

We use technology to help our clients and work on tight budgets. In an ergonomics evaluation, we'll take our iPads and we'll Skype workstations or in industrial settings a machine, and we can see remotely how someone works and operates.

It's helped us work on tight budgets. It's saved travel costs.

You used to have to go to the library and take out a big tome, the science citation index, and look it up.

We had a call from an attorney/client who wanted us to do noise monitoring for a major West Coast symphony orchestra. Someone who was experiencing some pain while playing. So it's kind of funny, right, to think about monitoring for noise, when sound is actually your work product.

We were able to prep very quickly using the Internet. Funny enough, they've done studies on this in Australia, symphony orchestras in Sydney. Depending on high you put the risers and how far apart you put the musicians, you can make significant changes for personal sound exposure.

"CNY Conversations" feature Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a person for CNY Conversations, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com.

Last week: E.J. Docteur on leading at Solvents and Petroleum Service.