Brad Souter

University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management

“A collaborative builder who is constantly seeks the next challenge.”

Hometown: Grimsby, Ontario

Fun Fact About Yourself: During my undergraduate years, I competitively built and raced canoes and toboggans made of concrete. This past January, I led a team of alumni to organize and host a concrete toboggan race in Waterloo. Over 500 competitors from 23 North American universities participated in the four-day competition.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Waterloo – Civil (Structural) Engineering

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Entuitive Engineering (Structural Engineer)

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: There are two new condominium towers being built in Toronto right now – this development represents both the greatest challenge and the greatest accomplishment of my career so far. My involvement with the project began during an undergraduate internship, as I contributed to the most basic design tasks. When my internship was over, the project was put on hold for sales, but by the time I returned after graduation it had become active again. Through the following two years, I gained more and more responsibility for the design of the buildings. By the time construction began in 2016, I had moved into the lead role for our engineering team. Every single step of the way was a new “first” for my career, so I feel like I grew up with the project. I’m incredibly proud to see the buildings nearing completion.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? Diversity – both in geographic background and area of expertise. This was most obvious at the Rotman Problem Solving Challenge weekend that I attended in May. I was really surprised to find that I was in the minority as a Toronto native for a single event held four months before the program even began. There was an incredible turnout of international students who had flown in from all over the world just for the weekend. The wide range of individual thought processes became obvious to me as soon as we broke out to work in teams, and I’ve heard from many others who had a similar experience. The diversity of my team members allowed us to quickly assess the problem from many angles, and eventually we converged on a great solution to present.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? This is a tough one for me – it really was a lot of incremental factors that led me to choose Rotman. If I had to pick the most dominant one, it would be the trajectory of the school in recent years. From the faculty generating thought leadership to the ever-expanding labs and institutes, it seems like the Rotman MBA program is constantly improving, and outpacing the competition. I am really excited to engage with faculty members whose work I’ve already read, and to get involved in some of the seemingly infinite extracurricular activities. We all expect that the network built during an MBA program will be one of the most valuable assets in our lives, and it seems that the total talent attracted to Rotman grows each year. I’m sure this has a lot to do with the efforts to continuously improve the program.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? My biggest focus in extracurriculars will be on building new problem-solving skills and applying them to business challenges. I’m also very competitive and love working with new teams, so naturally I’m looking most forward to getting involved in as many case competitions as I can. My functional interests are mostly related to business strategy and real estate asset management/investment, so I’ll certainly be looking to get involved through the clubs that focus on those topics.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? Early in my career, I tinkered with the idea of pursuing an MBA, but it remained a fringe interest as I focused on my technical skills. To be perfectly honest, up until about a year ago I had really shelved the idea of pursuing an MBA, as I seemed to be on a very promising path in my engineering career. However, as my role expanded to include team leadership and client management, I found I was losing interest in the technical engineering work and wanted to focus on these new responsibilities instead. There didn’t seem to be a good path towards this goal in my organization, so I started to look externally.

Through this process, I came to realize that nearly all of my long-term goals were centered on management and leadership. This naturally led to a rekindling of my interest in the MBA. As I dove into research of programs and possible career paths, each new piece of information excited me more than the last. By the time I had completed my research, I couldn’t imagine a future where I didn’t get my MBA. My mind was made up; I just needed to decide on the timing for starting a program. I felt that more time in my current role wouldn’t contribute much to the new management and leadership skills I sought, so I began the application process immediately.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? This decision was very much two-pronged. First, I spent a bunch of time making financial projections to determine the “break-even” point, when I would be in about the same financial position I would have been in if I didn’t pursue an MBA. At some point, that became a bit of a futile exercise since I was working with such speculative assumptions. However, I became confident that this break-even point would come some time in my thirties. I decided that I was comfortable with this and was satisfied that an MBA would be a financially positive investment in myself. Beyond the ROI, one of my major life goals is to either achieve a senior leadership role in a company or to run my own company. My engineering career has served me well so far, but it lacks opportunity for consistent focus on management and leadership. I saw the skills I could build through the MBA (especially intangible leadership skills) as essential to achieving my future goals. This really helped to confirm that the MBA was the right investment for me right now.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Richard Ivey School of Business (Western University), Smith School of Business (Queen’s University), Harvard Business School, Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).

How did you determine your fit at various schools? I visited all three of the Canadian schools that I applied to, and spent some time getting to know the current students to understand what their day-to-day is like. I’m very much a “throw me into the deep end” kind of person, so I wanted to find a program where I could immerse myself without limitations. I also wanted to be able to make my own experience at business school – I take a lot of pride in my work ethic, so I wanted to be somewhere where I would never run out of extra things to get involved with. As cliché as it sounds, I really wanted to find a culture built around the work hard, play hard mentality. More than any of the other schools I visited, Rotman felt the most aligned with what I was looking for.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? The defining moment of my life so far was the day I received my acceptance to the University of Waterloo. In all honesty, I applied myself poorly in high school and had barely scraped together a sufficient profile to get myself into the program. I’ll never forget the sinking feeling beforehand that I might not have done enough to achieve my goal, and I was terrified of that failure. When I received my acceptance, I was obviously relieved – but mostly I was motivated. Built on that fear of failure, I committed myself to always give 100% effort towards any goal I wanted to achieve. This has become the most fundamental principle that I live by today, and I owe most of my early career success to it.

What do you plan to do after you graduate? After graduating with my MBA, my goal is to land a career in management consulting. All my research and conversations with people in the industry have pointed to it being the most aligned with my interests. The biggest draw for me is the ability to work on diverse, challenging, and impactful problems.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Five years from now, I see myself continuing to work on my management, leadership, and business problem solving skills – and hopefully climbing the ladder at a consulting firm. It’s no secret that some consulting careers can be short-lived for MBA graduates, so if I happen to not be in a strategy consulting role in five years, I think that the most likely alternate path for me would be in commercial real estate investment/development.