“In July of 2018, after our Executive Team at LSA read June Jewell’s book, Find the Lost Dollars, we felt like it was a case study about our firm. We were able to identify with many of the culture traps and see where money was leaking in all nine areas of our business described in the book. We then attended the webinar, Getting Employees to Think Like Owners and as a team, became very motivated to explore how to train our employees to think like owners – and why not – we are a 100 percent employee‐owned company.
After meeting with June Jewell and exploring our business goals, we realized that investing in a complete Enterprise approach (i.e., training all 200+ of our employees on the Find the Lost Dollars business management training program) was the best way to get all staff on the same page and focused on finding lost dollars. Along with June Jewell, we identified the following goals:
- Bring all Principals to agreement with needed business management improvements.
- Increase project profit margins by elevating project manager skills and performance.
- Assess business practices and make improvements to processes and systems.
- Transform our culture to be more business focused.
- Increase fees and focus on getting clients and projects that are more profitable.
- Implement and empower employees to be more confident in business development.
- Implement positive measures to hold employees accountable.
Our first initiative was to launch the Find the Lost Dollars Business Management Assessment, which helped us identify strengths and weaknesses in nine areas of the business. It gave our employees a voice in guiding our direction, and received hundreds of suggestions for improvement as a result.
Next, our Principals group completed the training by combining the Find the Lost Dollars online courses with weekly group discussions. Then we expanded the training to project managers and emerging leaders over the following 18 months. Through this process, we were able to establish several major initiatives that we had previously not been able to identify, including:
- Daily timesheet entry by all staff;
- Only working on projects that have a signed contract;
- Holding weekly project budget and profitability report reviews;
- Updating our standard contract terms;
- Updating our estimating templates;
- Getting retainers up front;
- Decrease write‐offs from scope creep;
- Adding contingencies to budgets; and
- Cost recovery for subcontractors and vendors.
These initiatives have resulted in increasingly improving project management practices, which in turn have led to improvements in billings and cash flow. Our project managers are much more aware of managing projects to budget, getting retainers from new unknown clients, avoiding scope creep by getting change orders, and ensuring our fees are high enough to make a profit.
We will continue to train all our employees to Find the Lost Dollars so we can elevate the entire team to a high level of business aptitude. We are very excited with our results and highly recommend the Find the Lost Dollars program to architecture and engineering (A&E) firms looking to improve their financial results.”