Ken Weeden recently celebrated the 24th birthday of his consulting firm, Ken Weeden & Associates Inc. (KWA). 

Weeden is a certified airport planner and an impact analysis planner, as well as a member of the American Associations Planners group. As his Wilmington-based company has grown, he has become an expert in consulting on Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) programs – U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) certification programs created to ensure involvement of minority and women-owned businesses in highway and airport construction. 

KWA is a minority-owned business itself. 

Weeden’s company has become an expert source for DBE compliance, having made more than 1,000 plans for more than 100 entities nationally and in the Virgin Islands. 

Now an innovative businessman, Weeden went from studying journalism and literature as an undergraduate student to an urban development planner with 33 years of experience in the industry. Weeden recently sat down with the Greater Wilmington Business Journal to talk about how he became involved in DBE compliance work.

GWBJ: What made you decide to begin your own consulting firm? 

KW:  Since I first moved here in 1980, I’ve been involved primarily with various aspects of aviation facilities planning. I worked for a company here for nine years called Talbert, Cox & Associates.That firm had been bought, and I was concerned, so I decided to leave and become self-employed. I say self-employed, but I didn’t perceive it initially as starting a business. There’s a little bit of hippy-ism left in me. The hold-over activism from the 60s that was left in me didn’t like the idea of business, but I realized after a while that, hey, this is a business. … I really liked the idea of consulting because I wanted to be able to look at projects and decide which ones I wanted to work on.

GWBJ: How did you get involved in this sort of compliance planning work?

KW: I kept getting asked to do these minority business enterprise compliance plans. I think the fact that I am a minority had something to do with it. 

GWBJ: How has your educational background helped you in your business?

KW: My major was journalism, and I had a minor in English. I was always interested in writing and literature … I was in graduate school to get into urban transportation planning. To be a writer is to be a planner. Ultimately, everything you produce is in written form. I’ve been a regular writer all my life. Being a good writer can help you achieve a lot. 

GWBJ: Why do you often work specifically with transportation and aviation consulting planning?

KW: I ended up really liking aviation. Little kids always have an affinity for airplanes. My grandfather was a sharecropper – I recall the planes flying, and the little crop duster flying over the fields. As the planes went by, you just look at them. I was always fascinated by airplanes. 

GWBJ: What initially started your interest in work for programs like DBE? 

KW: Again, I didn’t plan to be. The environmental enterprise compliance plan is for the U.S. DOT. It’s a U.S. DOT requirement for the three operating federal agencies to have DBE programs – FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] has to have one for airports, and federal transit has to have one for transit programs. I kept getting asked to do plans, and I realized it was a niche. It was a necessary thing to do, and I felt like I had the knowledge and skills to do it. … And as far as the enthusiasm to do it, I felt the sense of a community. Because I am a minority enterprise myself and a DBE business myself, being able to do plans to help out my airport clients and indirectly help other minority businesses, it became a strong part of my professional mission to do that. … The DBE program is just one of many compliance elements that condition federal grants for transportation improvement projects. It’s a compliance requirement, and we are compliance specialists. That’s it. We fulfill that mission. The government requires them to do it, so they either have staff that does it or they hire consultants to do it for them, but they have to have it done. 

GWBJ: The National DBE Training Institute is a division of KWA. How did that get started?

KW: All our planning people would call us and say, ‘Hey, we got a new person.’ They ask, ‘Could you train them?’ and we said, ‘Sure!’ So we started off with something called DBE 101. We put together a little notebook and PowerPoint presentation to take to our plan offices and train their people who were new and knew nothing about DBE. … There is a need to really understand this regulation that we are so good at. We kept naming sessions, and we came up with nine different ones until we finally settled on the National DBE Training Institute.

GWBJ: How does the National DBE Training Institute differ from the other work in your business? 

KW: It’s really a helping mission more than a money-making mission. I use the word mission like I’m a missionary, and I guess in some way I am. But it is a business, definitely a business. I’ve learned to embrace business. I’ve overcome my late 1960s Woodstock-type days.  

GWBJ: Since you work with airports, do you like to travel yourself?

KW: Honestly, I’ve never thought about it that much. Since I finished school in ‘75, I’ve always had jobs that required me to travel. I like the variety of working in different places more than I do the idea of having to travel to those places, if that makes any sense. … It is nice to see different parts of the country and compare them to each other … Some cities have these totally unique pieces of Americana like Memphis and New Orleans. Everyone should go to Memphis or New Orleans at least once. 

GWBJ: The company is based in Wilmington. What are some projects you have planned locally?

KW: On the transportation side, we work regularly with compliance planning for Wilmington International Airport. We serve as their DBE program compliance consultant. We’ve also given some assistance to Wave Transit. We work nationally, but our home state DOT uses us too. On the non-transportation side, we also did minority business enterprise compliance throughout the employment of the convention center. 

GWBJ: Owning a nationwide company, would you say that is your greatest accomplishment?

KW: I don’t think in terms of any one single accomplishment, I think one of the biggest accomplishments is just being in business for 24 years. I embrace the idea of running a business where we embrace all the elements … as far as how to survive.  

… Offering services that help our clients and know that we are eventually helping small businesses – that’s gratifying because it’s dual help. 

The biggest thing that probably gives me the most satisfaction is 

having repeat business with the same clients over a number of years. There is no client like a repeat client; there is no business like a repeat business. You can get 100 new clients, or have one client you do 100 projects with.