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By Todd Perry | Be wary of spreading yourself and your services too thin; your team’s productivity and your firm's profits could begin to suffer.

By Mark Zweig | If you are seeing your cashflow slowing down and your average collection period rising, you may want to take a look at why that is happening.

“What causes AEC firms to fail? I have been a student of this business for 39 years now. Here’s what I have seen.”

“We need to collect our money sooner. With dragged out collection periods, most companies don’t have the working capital they need without borrowing.”

Are all your processes in place in the event your firm is waylaid by a wildfire, earthquake, hurricane or flood? Things were pretty much business as usual in early December with sunny skies and strong...

Every so often I have a number of disconnected thoughts for our readers, none of which merits all of my allotted space, but each of which could prove valuable. This is one of those weeks....

President of WestLAND Group, Inc. (Best Firm #41 Multi-discipline and Hot Firm #45 for 2017), a full-service civil engineering and land surveying firm based in Ontario, California. By Liisa Andreassen Correspondent “It’s important to identify...

Open book management is a big card to play, but it puts everyone on your team at the table, and that’s where you want them to be. One of the trendier ideas in management consulting...

Alternative collection methods at this time of year, even if it’s something radical, might come in handy if you need to ‘stock the cash coffers.’ As the last quarter of 2016 draws to a close,...

We got a fax the other day from a firm that wanted to cancel four seminar registrations it had sent in just a couple weeks before. Evidently, the firm had hit on hard times, had...

If you are you stuck in neutral, break out of the rut by asking questions, altering your approach, and accepting the possibility that there may be a problem. Some of us have a hard time...

By Mark Zweig | Many folks working in firms in the A/E/P and environmental consulting industry don't understand commonly-used financial terminology. How can you blame them? If no one ever explained it to them you...

By Tracey Jeffers Principal, Valuation Consulting ZweigWhite If you are involved with financial management at some level in your firm, you expect to regularly review the typical balance sheet and income statement. A smaller percentage...

Probably no one warned you before you started your A/E/P or environmental consulting firm about the slipperiest of slippery slopes— one you don’t want to go down— that of not paying your bills on time....

The year is winding up. Along with that, usually goes a little self-examination. One thing many firms are discovering as they go through this process is an alarming increase in old accounts receivable. By “old,”...

I am getting really tired of principals (and, in some cases, finance and accounting people) telling me that there’s no way they can do better than a 96-day, 105-day, or 119-day average collection period (ACP)...

If you ask me, a good deal of success in work (and in life) comes from doing what you need to do every day. If you can’t get done what should have been done today,...

As an old car guy, I’ve learned that gauges are vastly superior to “idiot lights.” Idiot lights tell you when something has gone wrong, such as “engine hot” (it is now overheated). Gauges tell you...

There are a few firms out there that really have their act together when it comes to the finance and accounting function. But by and large, A/E/P and environmental consulting firms struggle with what should...

The A/E/P and environmental consulting business is really pretty simple from a financial management standpoint. It shouldn’t be hard to track the numbers you need to run a firm, yet so many companies seem to...

Every firm in this industry must do four things to survive— sell work, do work, bill for work, and get paid for work. That’s it. If you ask me, architects, engineers, and environmental consultants (along...