The Relationship Guy
Team Profile: Robbie DeWitt, Business Development Manager
On a good Saturday, Robbie DeWitt is out in his garage with a record on, turning a wrench on a truck that is older than he is. The 1947 grain truck once belonged to his grandfather, R.E. DeWitt – the name still painted on the door, faded but legible. Robbie’s parents named him after that grandfather, a man he never got to meet. So now it is R.O. DeWitt working to get the old thing back on the road, with two boys not quite old enough to care yet, but old enough to be dragged out there occasionally to help.
What the Truck Teaches
It is a story he tells with obvious affection. But it also, without him quite meaning it to, says something true about the way Robbie thinks about everything: that the things worth having – the truck, the relationship, the name on the door – take time and continuity to preserve. You don’t just show up for the good parts.
The Connector
Robbie DeWitt is a Senior Business Development Manager at InnoTech Engineering, and for seven years he has been the person who builds the relationships that keep the company’s work coming in. But “business development” undersells it. Robbie is, at his core, a connector – someone whose brain, as he puts it, “fires” when he can match a customer’s problem with exactly the right person to solve it.
From Instrumentation to People
That instinct is what pulled him away from a career in instrumentation. He had about five years of technical experience, but somewhere along the way he started asking a colleague when the work was going to get interesting. The answer: you’ll find your thing. He did.
“I was more interested in talking to people than I was in the technical details,” he says. “And if you can tie those two together – connecting good people with good customers – that’s where I thrive.”
Seeing How Industries Connect
Fifteen-plus years of combined technical and sales experience has given him an unusually broad view of the industry – broad enough to hold meaningful conversations at almost any level of a client organization, to read what a customer actually needs before they’ve fully articulated it, and to step back far enough to see how companies depend on each other in ways that aren’t always obvious. He has two customers, he notes, one of whom extracts the ethane that serves as feedstock for the other’s plastics operation. They’re technically independent. They’re fundamentally connected. That kind of view, he says, is something he would never have developed if he had stayed on the technical side.
Start With Why
The bigger-picture thinking was nurtured, in part, by InnoTech founder Mark Nudd, with whom Robbie has worked on and off for most of his career. The “start with why” philosophy – understanding the driving factors behind a project before anyone touches a control system – shaped how Robbie approaches every client conversation.
The Promise of Staying
At InnoTech, the value proposition he is selling isn’t just engineering capability. It’s the promise of staying. Larger competitors are often structured around project revenue: full engagement for the duration, then move on. InnoTech plays a longer game, focused on the asset and the relationship well beyond any single contract.
“Some of the sites we’ve worked at, we’ve been serving since the very beginning,” he says. “That’s the kind of relationship we want – where customers trust us to be part of their team.”
Only as Good as the Last Job
Trust, he is clear, is earned through follow-through. On pricing. On quality. On showing up when something unexpected happens. “We’re only as good as the last job we did,” he says. It is a standard he repeats like someone who has watched what happens when companies stop holding themselves to it.
Gratitude, and Home
That orientation toward generosity extends beyond clients. For Robbie, community involvement isn’t an obligation – it’s a reminder. Volunteering, he says, keeps your perspective in the right place. “We’re blessed beyond belief in this city, in this country,” he says. “Gratitude is overlooked far too often.”
Then, after a long week, he goes home, puts on a record, and reminds himself of that with his hands in the engine of a truck that still has his family’s name on the door.