Business Women Awards 2022
Achievement Honoree Valerie Southern, Valerie J. Southern Transportation Consultant LLC
WITH A CAREER in transportation planning, engineering and design in both rural and urban settings, Valerie Southern learned a lot before setting out on her own.
Before she started Valerie J. Southern Transportation Consultant LLC, time working for others was full of high-profile projects and organizations. Now on the cusp of retirement, Southern plans to share wisdom – especially about networking – with other female entrepreneurs.
Born in Illinois, Southern was one of five children in a military family. When she was in kindergarten, her father was assigned to Quonset Point Naval Air Station in North Kingstown, and the family relocated to Jamestown.
She served as deputy director of policy under Gov. Edward D. DiPrete from 1987 to 1990 before accepting a position for two years as deputy secretary of transportation planning and capital programming at the Mass. Executive Office of Transportation and Construction, where she helped oversee a $1.6 billion budget.
But she later decided to start her own consulting firm in Seattle and hire independent contractors to help her and company senior engineer Gary Norris with transportation projects. The firm’s expertise ranges from long- and short-term master planning to traffic engineering and design to parking supply and demand analysis.
The professional networking mindset Southern used is one any new entrepreneur can adopt, she said.
“It’s a matter of communicating my desire to bring my knowledge to a project and communicating that I am qualified,” she said. “It’s not the type of thing where someone is doing me a favor; it’s establishing a mutual agreement that we have something to offer each other. That’s a respectful starting point.”
She began getting calls from government entities and established businesses, asking her to join their teams. But the world of entrepreneurship was very different from the public and corporate domains to which she had grown accustomed.
“When I made the transition from a very large, well-staffed firm to an independent existence, all that corporate support was gone,” she said.
Southern returned to Jamestown in 2015. There weren’t many women of color running businesses in this field, and she was largely unknown in the area. But Southern made inroads, and she joined the Rhode Island chapter of the American Council of Engineering Companies and other industry groups.
Involvement in such organizations will continue in Southern’s pending retirement. As for the transportation industry overall, she sees hope in President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
