History of H&A Systems Engineering

H&A Systems Engineering opened its doors for business in August of 1994 in Hawthorne, California. The idea of entering private practice occurred to Kip Haggerty during a job interview in the late eighties. He had just interviewed with a small company that could have used his skills for a few months, but was not in a position to hire him full-time. The idea gestated for six years until two things served as the impetus for his entering private practice.

The first was the marriage of Kip to fellow engineer, Leslie Haggerty (nee Abernethy). Leslie possessed technical skills complimentary to Kip's and they had a good deal of experience working together in the stressful environment of new business proposals at Hughes.

The second was circulation of an answer from company President Mike Smith to a question about management actions to improve employee morale. Mike's answer was that if employee morale was low, then the employees were not being accountable for their own morale. He went on to state that if employees feel like they have done everything they can at this company, then they should do like Michael Jordan and go play baseball (Note: this was the year Michael Jordan played minor league baseball before rejoining the Bulls). Mike Smith inspired us to enter private practice or in his words: "... go play baseball."

Within six weeks we had assessed our financial ability to start a business and opened our doors. Our initial concept was to bring the benefits of systems engineering to small technology companies. After several years, we began to more finely focus our efforts. Kip continued to lead engineering services for control, communication, and sensor systems. Leslie started an Internet component to the business focused on providing custom software for web-based commerce and user communication.

In April 2000, we relocated the business from Hawthorne to El Segundo to provide more space and easy access to engineering services clients throughout the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area including the San Fernando Valley, the Inland Empire, and Orange County.