Search results

By Kraig Kern | An observation on modern communication, efficiency, and the messages that quietly disappear.

By Mark Zweig | High-performing skeptics can sharpen decisions or quietly poison culture – the difference lies in how leaders engage them.

By Julia Moroney | AEC firms must protect flexibility without sacrificing mentorship and visibility for young leaders.

By Michael Sanderson | The future of professional services depends less on hours logged and more on trust, ownership, and meaningful results.

By Matt Cooper | These firms often rely on few clients, multitasking staff, and undocumented processes, creating volatility, inefficiency, and growth challenges.

By Mark Zweig | These qualities will be essential for entrepreneurial leaders in the AEC business to have in the coming months and years ahead.

By Mark Zweig | These misleading statements often stem from naivety and perpetuate harmful conventional wisdom.

By Chad Coldiron, Casey Shea & Stefanie Richter | High-performing firms that embrace technology solutions are seeing transformative results across their operations.

By Mark Zweig | 2025 offers opportunities for AEC firms to thrive through responsiveness, strategic metrics, strong banking ties, and workplace honesty.

By Kraig C. Kern | Corporate giving today should be about about creating meaningful opportunities for employees to make a difference while developing professionally.

By Mark Zweig | Entrepreneurship is all about seeing and doing things differently from everyone else, so maybe you should be more questioning of the status quo.

By Leisbel Lam | To integrate effective change management, identify needs, understand deeply, honor the past, mandate change, and provide a precise, optimistic roadmap forward.

By Mark Zweig | Being able to see things through the eyes of the people you work with and who work for you is one of the most critical leadership skills you can develop.

By Mark Zweig | Open-book management is about sharing financial performance data with employees to foster trust, educate, and improve the firm’s overall performance.

By Gordon Greene | If you trust your staff and have hired people with integrity, you will never need to tell someone you want them 90 percent utilized.

By Eric Wilson | With the right set of values and organizational alignment, you may find yourself in a positive feedback loop where shared principles guide you toward collective goals.

By Mark Zweig | When used consistently, this strategy will allow you to grow faster, raise fees, shed bad clients, and ramp up your pipeline of job candidates.

By Mark Zweig | We’ve all heard about the attributes of highly effective people, but what about the habits of highly ineffective people?

By Kevin Johns | These five financial considerations are just a few of the measures that successful AEC firms put in place to build long-term organizational health.

By Mark Zweig | Only a small number of people really get the idea that building a business is not a sprint – it’s an endurance race. It is all about who can last the...

By Mark Zweig | Not only do you need to monitor and report on the right performance metrics for your firm, but you also have to explain what these numbers mean to your people.

By Christina Zweig Niehues | Take advantage of the smartphone and internet addiction – make your firm internet famous and reap the rewards!

By Mercedez Thompson | Leaders must engage in burnout prevention strategies that alleviate overburdened employees, reduce the number of meetings, encourage PTO, and promote flexible hours.

By Mitchell Shope | Leveraging reinforcement theory will connect the action to the reward and bolster your firm’s morale and cultural identity.

By Eduardo Smith | Company culture, employee engagement, and morale are often the differentiators between common and great companies.

President and CEO of Ramey Kemp & Assoc. (Raleigh, NC), a transportation engineering, planning, and design firm founded in 1992.

“There are many ways to ‘cook the books’ so they show certain results. Here are some typical problems that we see showing up in the financial statements of A/E firms.”

Former president of CobbFendley (Houston, TX), a 530-person firm that is committed to providing innovative engineering solutions with the goal of bettering communities.

President and CEO of ARM Group (Hershey, PA), a science and engineering consulting firm where the entrepreneurial spirit thrives.

CEO of Ardurra Group (Tampa, FL), an engineering consulting firm with a focus on the positive.

President of JBCI, a small, but venerable, repair and restoration firm based in Philadelphia.

It’s a daunting task, but can result in an energized, unified organization that can withstand setbacks while gaining strength. Companies with a highly engaged workforce have seen a 19.2 percent increase in operating income; highly...

When it comes to our projects, we need to know as much as we can to ensure we stay on track for our firm and our clients. There’s a fine line between what we know...

Getting the information you need on how to run your business in a timely manner is an absolute requirement for survival and success in the A/E business today. As business owners this has to be...

One of the best things we can do as leaders is create more leaders, but to be effective, the effort must be deliberate. It’s a rare organization that succeeds without a solid succession plan identifying...

After 37 years of working in one industry, you eventually become aware of just about every bit of what passes for “conventional wisdom” in this business. Some of it may seem logical on the surface...

Install rigorous controls with your PMs when it comes to the average collection period, and watch the money flow back into your accounts. As 2016 fades into the past and we prepare the year-end analysis,...

Zweig Group’s 2016 Financial Performance Survey of Architecture, Engineering, and Environmental Consulting Firms, gives firm leaders a clear view into industry trends and financial metrics that can help firms effectively manage their resources. The best...

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...

Sometimes, firms get lost in utilization and project profitability, and end up solving the wrong problem. People respond to what you track and report. The accounting really does matter. For example, we've helped companies dismantle...

Implementing these 8 easy changes can help your firm work smarter, not harder, and reap the monetary rewards. I have always felt that, if A/E and environmental consulting firms spent as much time on getting...

Keynote Title: Driving more ROI from your Existing IT Investments Speaker: Noah Eckhouse, VP Portfolio Development Description: Plenty of software vendors are anxious to sell CIOs and CFOs "the next great thing”; however, only a...

Flaws in current system can be overcome through strategic adjustments. Being a project manager in the typical A/E/P or environmental firm is rarely easy. Think about it: In most firms in this business, it is...

This article first appeared in The Zweig Letter (ISSN 1068-1310) Issue # 990 Originally published 1/14/2013 (Doing the same thing but expecting a different result.) I just got asked why I came back to ZweigWhite...

This article first appeared in The Zweig Letter (ISSN 1068-1310) Issue # 987 Originally published 12/17/2012 See what more successful firms than yours are doing, straight from ZweigWhite’s surveys. We’re down to the end of...

By Ed Friedrichs Chairman, ZweigWhite When I was CEO of Gensler I was often asked how I kept track of it all. At the end of my tenure, we had 2,400 people in 25 offices...

By Mark C. Zweig Founder & CEO, ZweigWhite We are talking more and more about the importance of good project management in boardrooms these days. There isn’t much more you can do to increase your...

By Mark Zweig CEO, ZweigWhite We’ve had a rough three years. And although there have been some bright spots and encouraging moments, it could get a whole lot worse. I read one gloom and doom...

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...

By Mark C. Zweig I thought it might be fun to reflect back on my 30-plus years of working in this business and assemble a list of fundamental laws none of us can get around....

There’s a popular book out right now in the education field entitled The Global Achievement Gap written by a fellow named Tony Wagner, the co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard University. I picked...

After 28 years of working with architects and engineers who are either sole or part owners in their firms, I can honestly say that these folks are deficient in their knowledge of rudimentary finance and...

By Mark Zweig | If you really want to raise your effective labor multiplier, here are some things to try.

Business planning does not have to be difficult. Every single firm needs a plan, whether you are a five-person architectural firm started two years ago, or a 3,000-employee, 35-year-old engineering and environmental consulting company. But...

While there have been some “experts” who’ve made names for themselves by bashing IT and saying it is, at best, a necessary evil, I completely disagree with them. There are so many ways IT can...

The longer I’ve worked with A/E/P and environmental firms, the more clear it has become to me: Most firms are working on the wrong side of the equation when it comes to boosting effective multipliers...

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,...

I had a nice woman come up to me before a talk I gave in Rochester, New York, last week. She asked me if we had ever considered doing an article on how to recognize...

You know what? Turnover is not always so bad. Sometimes people just don’t keep up with the firm. There are all kinds of reasons for it. Maybe they got tired. Maybe they got turned off....

As you get your A/E/P or environmental firm ready for 2003, you may be patting yourselves on the back. The fact is that while overall, 2002 was not as good as 2001, a lot of...

John Dilbertson left the Dilbertson & Terry board meeting shaking his head. How many times did they have to reconsider the issue of principal compensation, particularly base pay? It seemed like it never ended. One...

At one of my “Managing a Growing Firm” seminars a few weeks ago, I had an attendee tell me how another attendee was handling his ownership transition program. When I asked him who was offering...

It’s always interesting to me when I encounter people who don’t think you can get rich (that’s right, I said “rich”) in this business. But before we get started, please let me clarify. “Rich” to...

I just came back from a management retreat with a client we first worked for a couple of years back. They are what I would call a mid-sized firm in a large metro area. And...

A common theme is emerging in our business right now, especially with large firms— but certainly not limited to them. Firms need to improve their profits. Volume is up, optimism is up, backlog is growing,...

Call me any names you want. It won’t be the first time. But it doesn’t matter. I’m tough. I can take it. I have the power of my own convictions and conscience to get me...

Did you ever notice how some companies muddle along while others seem to keep advancing? What allows some firms to make so much more progress and to get so much more accomplished than others? It’s...

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...

We work for the owners and top managers of a lot of different A/E/P and environmental firms. While all those companies and their managers are different, they share one thing— they’re not happy with project...

Sometimes I think the owners and managers of A/E and environmental firms need a strong dose of realism. We seem to want to bury our heads in the sand to avoid the obvious, or wish...

When you hear the word “elitism,” it usually strikes a negative chord. Used in the context of describing an A/E/P or environmental consulting firm, the first thing that comes to mind is: “They think they’re...

On Monday, December 20, 1993, William Edwards Deming, the 93-year-old management guru of Total Quality Management (TQM) died in his sleep. A statistician with a doctorate in Physics from Yale, Deming was credited with engineering...

In any number of surveys conducted over the years on what demotivates professionals in the workplace, “not feeling in on things” always ranks at or near the top. By “demotivation,” we are referring to what...

This is the time of year many firms do their budgeting. Unfortunately, many of them make the budgeting process far more difficult than it has to be. Small firms may not know where to start...