How Can You Tell When You’ve Got a Keeper?
Hiring enough people— and the right ones— is where it’s at today. How well an A/E/P or environmental firm does this really is either an impediment (or stimulus) to growth. It impacts every area of...
Hiring enough people— and the right ones— is where it’s at today. How well an A/E/P or environmental firm does this really is either an impediment (or stimulus) to growth. It impacts every area of...
As usual, this year’s Zweig Letter Hot Firm Conference & Celebration in Boston drew a great crowd. We had the typical smiling, optimistic, high-growth A/E and environmental firm principals and managers in abundance and it...
I was surprised to see in our latest 2004 Principals, Partners & Owners Survey of A/E/P & Environmental Consulting Firms that the balancing of work and personal life issue was barely on the radar screen...
It just doesn’t matter what type of business one talks about. Whether you are a housepainter, you sell window blinds, or you are in the architecture, engineering, or environmental consulting business— ALL of your clients,...
When I first got out of graduate school with my MBA back in 1980, I went to work for a consulting/recruiting firm in St. Louis that specialized in serving the construction and real estate development...
We all know it. If we cannot train a second generation of leaders who will be able to take over the firm and run it successfully after we are gone, we probably won’t see any...
We are now in our 17th year of working with A/E/P and environmental firms of all types and sizes around the world. And, over that time, we have seen literally thousands of different companies’ business...
As the economy inches its way toward improvement, we are seeing A/E/P and environmental firms rekindling their interest in merger and acquisition activities. In fact, it’s almost a mini-boom of activity that’s occurring right now....
It’s hard to grow if you can’t keep the people you already have working for you. Every time someone leaves you have to replace them. And it’s as hard or harder than ever— as well...
Regardless of your opinion of Bill Clinton (and I am sure, for the majority of A/E firm principals, it’s negative— as a group, you are 48% Republicans and only 17% Democrats!), you cannot deny one...
Years ago, I coined a term called “supply-side human resources management.” The basic theory of supply-side human resources management goes something like this: If an A/E or environmental firm invests heavily in its recruitment function,...
Ask any expert and they will tell you that you should be doing succession planning at all levels in the organization. What is succession planning? It’s simply answering who is going to take over when...
While there is no doubt a downside to employing too many seasoned veterans in terms of their vacation accrual rates and basic hourly labor cost, I do not understand why some A/E and environmental firms...
Every so often, I have to remind our readers of the importance of their office environments. Our own recent office rehab here in Natick, along with a trip to New York and seeing some not-so-great...
When we remade our Revolutionary Marketing newsletter into The Zweig A/E Marketing Letter, we had a simple idea. Cut the theory and direct the focus of our efforts to implementation. What can firms DO differently...
A couple weeks ago, a motley group of A/E firm principals and I went on a 700+ mile ride on two-lane roads through some beautiful countryside in New Hampshire, Vermont, and just a little bit...
For each of the past five years since we created The Zweig Letter Hot Firm List, there have always been readers out there who write in to ask why we are so obsessed with growth...
My theory is that no firm is completely happy with how it handles project management. There are always problems. And one of the common complaints heard is, “We don’t have enough good project managers.” While...
If you listen to Tony Soprano talking to his therapist about his rage in recent episodes of “The Sopranos” on HBO, he complains about all the B.S. It just makes him mad. And when he...
Everyone in the A/E or environmental consulting business wants to turn their technical people into sellers. Not a week goes by that the desire to do this isn’t mentioned to me by someone in this...
For whatever reason— and I have seen it countless times— sometimes the work environment just goes bad. Like fruit that sits in the bowl too long, it rots, it molds, and it becomes intolerable. Just...
Last Saturday morning a friend of mine, Peter Sisk, called to see if he could stop by my house on his way out of town to visit his aging parents in Hartford. He had the...
“Take this job and shove it” was a phrase popularized by country singer Johnny Paycheck back in the 1970s. The song told a story about a hard-working factory man whose wife left him, so he...
It’s one of those certainties, like death and taxes. Managers are supposed to hold those who work for them accountable to reaching certain goals or achieving certain performance metrics. It sounds good to say, “I...