Over our time in the civil engineering industry we have come to live by some simple rules to take some of the chaos out of a bid based engineering discipline. No business is perfect and all of us can improve on something to minimize inefficient habits in the day to day. Many of our partners acknowledge that those habits exist but don’t know how to identify them or are simply too busy to take the time to direct their processes themselves. That’s where we come in! A fresh perspective and constructive criticism can always benefit your business’s bottom line. One thing we have learned is to make suggestions with quantitative supporting data as to proposed time or money saved by anything we find.
THINGS WE LOOK TO HELP WITH
Managerial Oversight: Managers can be a tricky balancing act as organizations scale. We take a look at the cost, scope, and effectiveness of your most expensive production related employees to see if their utilization matches the price.
Production Details: Production is usually a jumble of conflicting priorities and considerations from many sides. Client expectations, internal team goals, low hanging fruit for invoicing, and review entity requirements can all be affecting production at the same time. We ask the questions your employees might not be. Do you need to satisfy that client demand? Are your production goals & processes in line with your larger business objectives?
Process Hand-offs: Hand-offs can be a huge bottle neck. A multi-phase production process, a multi-team consulting procedure, or even just several teams working in different markets all can have similar efficiency issues when it comes to process hand-offs. Something that is top priority for your administrative team could be business as usual for sales. A market that has dried up its pool of work could have flexible resources available to deliver a better product in your busiest work area. We take a look in to how your teams and processes interact with each other to see if there is any lost effort.
Communication: In advanced organizations, this is where most fall short. Effective communication is the key focus and what we look for in our management consulting clients. Saying what you need with as few words as possible (while still getting the result you need) is an art all in its own. Maybe you need to remind your clients that its better to be respected than liked and assert your value as a business. Maybe you need to encourage collaboration to solve more problems before reaching the higher chain of command. It could even be that you have too much communication and not enough action. All of these are potential long term wounds that will cost you enterprise in the long run. Let us help you identify and work to fix the communication hurtles that plague your company.
Invoicing & Payment: We like to think of this as the cherry on top of our management consulting services. One of the most intimidating phrases to a small engineering business is “paid when paid”. It essentially is saying ”you’ll get your money eventually”. Unfortunately this along with other unit based cash flow systems are the nature of the business. It ties into several of the other topics above. We like to put this at then end of our objectives at least chronologically because normally the payment milestones are effected to some degree once the work has been put into the other areas above. That being said it is NOT a backburner focus. Reliable cash flow is a must for a business looking to grow. Negotiating pricing post contract signature & organizing production with inviolability in mind are just a few ways we can help finalize the effort put into your business. You deserve adequate pay for the services or products you provide and we want to help you get it.
