Find the Lost Dollars Blog
Introducing the Audiobook Version of “RAISE Your Value”
We are thrilled to unveil the latest addition to the "RAISE Your Value" family: the audiobook version! Following the tremendous success of the hard copy release last year, we recognized the need to cater to the busy and dynamic lifestyles of professionals in the...
5 TOP BUSINESS CHALLENGES A&E FIRMS FACE IN 2024
The business environment for A&E firm is changing due to growing competition, fee pressure, technology advances and hybrid work arrangements. Most A&E firms struggle to adapt to the fast pace of change. In working with A&E firms of every size and...
Increase Revenue with no Extra Work in 12 Months: The RAISE Your Value Fee Accelerator Program
We are excited to announce the launch of our new program – the RAISE Your Value $1M Fee Accelerator kicking off in January. This blog post will provide information about the program, the results you can expect to achieve and how you can be one of a small group of...
Strategic Advantage: Harnessing the VQ Assessment for A&E Excellence
In today's competitive landscape, architecture and engineering (A&E) firms face numerous challenges when it comes to differentiating themselves, maintaining profitability, and cultivating a company culture that truly embodies their values. In my newest book, RAISE...
Stop Sabotaging Your Success: Insights from Geostrata Magazine
In a recent article published in Geostrata Magazine by June Jewell, the key challenges and opportunities in the engineering and architectural sectors are discussed, shedding light on why some firms manage to charge high fees and achieve significant profits while...
Mastering the Art of Strategic Pricing: A Guide for A&E Firms
Many A&E firms lack strategic pricing. If you look at proposals from architects and engineers of all disciplines, most firms calculate and present their pricing in a similar way. Focusing solely on acquiring new clients or projects puts them at a disadvantage....
10 Steps to Raise Your Firm’s Value
Raising the perception of your firm's value among clients, employees, and the wider community holds the potential to profoundly transform your organization. This transformation promises several significant advantages. Firstly, it can lead to increased success in...
Training A&E Project Managers for High Financial Performance
We waited ten years for business to be booming again, and now that it is, most of our problems have gone away, right? In reality, we just have different problems, and for some firms, more problems. That is because as we grow and add more people, offices,...
Increase Fees and Achieve Client Goals: Crafting a Win-Win Scope of Services for A&E Projects
As an A&E professional, creating a robust scope of services is a crucial step in establishing strong client relationships, protecting your fees, and fostering opportunities for upselling. The process of defining the scope requires careful consideration, effective...
How to Build Unshakeable Confidence in Your Project Managers
Today’s A&E (Architecture & Engineering) project managers are challenged by staff labor shortages, turnover, client fee pressure and responsibility for tasks they are not trained to do. Some of these responsibilities include: Business Development and...
Maximizing Productivity and Nurturing Talent: Thriving Amidst A&E Labor Shortages
Dealing with an overwhelming workload and severe labor shortages has become an existential threat to A&E firm growth and success. All studies and data show this problem continuing long into the future. However, there are proactive measures that can be taken to not...
A&E Firm Sales Success: The Power of an Effective Sales Process
In the competitive world of Architecture and Engineering (A&E) firms, the sales process is a crucial aspect of success. Securing new projects and clients heavily depends on going after the right projects, managing sales opportunities, and submitting well-crafted...
Kleinschmidt Associates implements a strategic client acquisition and relationship strategy to double in size in a few years.
Success story provided by Jon Christensen, CEO, Kleinschmidt Associates During the past 35 years in the architecture and engineering (A&E) industry I have watched with deep frustration the slow deterioration in the assumed level of prestige and value of our...
How to Review Your Decade
Happy New Year! Congratulations on another year and decade of growth and expansion! A lot has happened in the world, in the country, in the industry, and I’m sure, for you personally. Most A&E firms are much better off than they were ten years ago. But that...
10 Steps to Transition Your A&E Firm from Old-School to Modern and Relevant
Today’s A&E firms are facing the biggest talent shortage in history. Record low unemployment and competition for top talent is forcing firms to offer higher salaries, and become more creative with benefits, work-life balance and culture. On top of the talent...
Five Steps to Increase Profit Margins on Professional Services Projects
With competition tougher and margins smaller for professional services firms, we need to have every advantage to ensure our projects are profitable. Many things erode the margins on our projects including bad estimates, scope creep, poor resource management and issues...
{Guest Post} 4 KPIS to Track Business Development Success
Is your business development (BD) program successful? Whether you answered yes or no, here’s a question to ponder: how do you know? Two challenges facing professional services firms today are both having an understanding of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as well as...
5 Steps to Help Your Project Managers Succeed
Your project managers (PMs) face daily challenges to their success that they are unprepared for. Becoming a PM can feel like moving to a foreign country – everything feels strange and everyone is speaking a different language. PMs today have more demands on their...
{Guest Post} Five basic rules for better Go/No Go decisions in A/E/C industry
We fixate on go/no go in this industry. As we should. Go/no go is the pivotal decision point in A/E/C consulting firms’ business where we consider 'spending or not spending' our precious overhead dollars to pursue work. It is an important marketing and business...
2019 AEC Profitability Summit Attendees Find a Potential $39 Million in Lost Profits
The AEC Profitability Summit is an event developed specifically to help architecture and engineering firm leaders increase profits by focusing on implementing business management best practices. 2019 was our third Profitability Summit and this year we returned to...
How to Get Your Employees to Follow Profitable Best Practices
One of the most frustrating aspects of running a business is getting employees to follow your business processes. Whether it is submitting timesheets late, making mistakes on proposals, failing to respond to clients correctly or failing to get approvals for extra...
Stop Wasting Time! Get Your Employees to Work Smarter (Not Harder)
“According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information.” Source: http://utrconf.com/top-3-reasons-why-we-spend-so-much-time-searching-for-information/ One of your employees, let’s...
5 Steps to Get Your Leadership Team on the Same Page
Is your executive team on the same page about where your firm is heading? One of the most critical factors to successful A&E business results is being able to make the right decisions that will drive the firm’s growth and profitability. When there is a lack of...
5 Keys to Higher Profits and Happier Employees
You want higher profits and happier employees but getting both may seem impossible. The relationship between firm financial success and employee happiness is not always obvious, but higher profits enable investment in staff and systems that in turn, makes them enjoy...
7 Secret Causes of Scope Creep
Scope creep – that vicious blood-sucker that steals your project profits. When the scope of the work done exceeds what is promised in your contract, and you don’t get more money, you pay for it. It comes straight from your profit margins and can leave a project at a...
Focus on Business Excellence! How A Mid-size Environmental Firm Transformed Their Culture, Teams and Profits
In 2014 Hillmann Consulting, a then 100-person environmental consulting firm based in Union, NJ, found itself on the cusp of growth. They started seeing what many A&E firms experience when transitioning from a small local firm to a mid-size geographically...
The Three Biggest Challenges to Fast Growth in the A&E Firm (and what to do about them)
We waited ten years for business to be booming again, and now that it is, most of our problems have gone away, right? In reality, we just have different problems, and for some firms, more problems. That is because as we grow and add more people, offices, services,...
How to be a Top Tier A&E Firm
The majority of A&E firms will concur that 2017 and 2018 have been stellar years for the industry. Opportunities have been abundant, and economists are telling us that it is likely that the momentum will continue into next year. With this high volume...
QK Finds Lost Dollars with Profit-Enhancing Employee Development Program
“While I have always been concerned for the client, the company, project performance and profits, as an engineer my focus has always been on the technical aspect of the work. This focus on quality and technical excellence will never change. What has changed, however,...
10 Dirty Secrets of the Best A&E Firms
The Architecture, Engineering and Environmental industry is as hot as it has ever been in my 30-year tenure, yet even when work is booming, I still find even the best A&E firms struggle to meet targets in any given month, quarter or year. So many factors impact...
The Blessing and the Curse of Being So Busy
The Architecture and Engineering industry is busier right now than it has been in a long time. This is great for your firm – right? I talk with at least 5 to 10 A&E firm CEOs a week, and their results are surprisingly mixed. While it is obviously a booming market...
Why Some A&E Firms Make More Money Than Others
Many A&E firms come to me because their profits are too low, not hitting expected targets, and barely enabling the firm to grow. In most cases, their projects are making a profit – just not at the levels expected or needed. The leaders of these firms are...
10 Keys to Increasing Utilization
The employee utilization rate is one of a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) used by A&E firms to measure the ability of the firm to keep employees working on billable projects.Your employees are your firm's primary asset and...
Turning Around an Underperforming Team
Are you frustrated because not every team in your firm is hitting their goals or performing at their highest level? Unfortunately you may have groups that struggle to be profitable, have high turnover, or don’t embrace your firm’s culture. It can be difficult to hold...
5 Ways to Increase Accountability in Your A&E Firm
If there is one issue that I have heard repeatedly in working with A&E firms over the last 27 years, it is the difficulty of getting employees to fully accept responsibility – to be held accountable for their actions and performance. This issue goes so deep, that...
5 Crucial Steps for Project Manager Success
The success of your Project Managers (PMs) can make or break your firm. Right? Considering all of the tasks that the typical project manager is required to perform, it is no wonder that many PMs get frustrated or even lose money! I did an assessment of the typical...
3 Estimating Lessons to Boost Project Profits
We have all had projects that for some reason did not meet our financial expectations. Overbudget projects happen for many reasons, including bidding on the wrong projects to begin with, underestimating the number of hours needed to successfully complete the project,...
Time is Money: Improve Your Employee Time Management
Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. ~Jim Rohn, American Speaker and Author In a professional services business, the expression “time is money” is truly accurate. Your employees’ time is the greatest asset your...
How to Save your Project Managers Two Hours a Week
The main complaint I am hearing from A&E firm leaders these days is how they would love to “find more time” for their project managers (PMs). With workloads the highest they’ve been for many years, and talented and experienced PMs difficult to hire, asking PMs to...
How to Get the Most Value from Investing in AEC Project Management Training
There is a growing trend in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industries to train project managers (PMs). Reasons include the obvious goal of improved performance – both qualitative and financial. Other reasons are grounded in the many challenges faced by...
How to Get Leadership Buy-in for Business Management Training
Many of our clients see the need to improve the business acumen of their project managers (PMs) and other technical staff. Even the project managers themselves, many of who have come up through technical ranks and have little to no formal project management training,...
How to Make 3% More on Your Next Project
In my book, Find the Lost Dollars, I focus on the impact of just a 1% increase in profits in nine areas of your business. The reason for focusing on such a small increase is twofold – first – it sounds easy. Most employees will gladly step up to help the...
Are You Blowing Through Yellow Lights?
As we drive along the roads each day we make split second decisions. These decisions can have zero or life changing consequences, or anything in between. A cautionary yellow light can occur when driving slow or fast, far from the intersection or right in it. Once in a...
The Elusive “Right” Conversations A&E Firms Frequently Miss Getting Right
Conversations fuel A&E firms' success. Conversations are taking place all day long at A&E firms, yet 75% are the wrong conversations. Most conversations in your company are killing productivity, utilization rates and ultimately profits. Did you realize there...
Holding Project Managers Accountable for Profitability
While most A&E firms expect their project managers (PMs) to deliver profitable projects, many have not put the appropriate measures in place to ensure that it happens. Accountability at the PM level is often vague and unstructured, which can lead to several...
10 Ways to Make More Money in 2016
It is hard to believe 2016 is here. I always get excited about the beginning of a new year - I look at it as an opportunity to start over, correct the mistakes of the past and achieve some of the goals that eluded me in the previous year. For most of our clients, 2015...
{Guest Post} The Power of 1%
We have all heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” and yet I would venture to guess that few of us really understand how to do just that. There is however, a very simple concept that demonstrates the critically important issue of how to constantly improve...
Developing Superstar Project Managers
In looking at the operations of an Architecture or Engineering firm, it is evident that the project manager (PM) role is the key to success. In addition to their normal project management responsibilities, most PMs are also involved in many other aspects of firm...
AEC Business Solutions Partners with ACEC National to Provide New Educational Resources to the Engineering Industry
AEC Business Solutions, LLC is proud to announce that they have met the rigorous requirements to be able to provide continuing education credits and educational resources for Professional Engineers through the Registered Continuing Education Program (RCEP);...
5 Steps to Reduce Scope Creep in Your AEC Firm
Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms lose money on projects due to many causes, and our research shows that scope creep and failure to bill for extra services is at the top of the list as the biggest cause by far. Scope Creep is the erosion of the...
8 Ways to Make More Money in 2015
I can’t believe it is already 2015. The beginning of a new year is a great opportunity to gain a different perspective and a more effective business management strategy. While we are all in business to make money, it is amazing that we persist with business practices...
The 5 Top Risks to Project Profitability
These days projects are hard to get and project profit margins are declining. With more competition nationally and from overseas firms, it is critical to manage projects with precision, and utilizing best practices for financial management. With some focus on those...
Do You Have a Strong Project Management Culture?
There were many trends discussed for engineering firms at the 2013 national American Consulting Engineers Council (ACEC) national conference last month in Washington, DC. I always pay close attention to these discussions in order to make sure I am on top of the latest...