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TRANSACTIONS ARDURRA ACQUIRES CRM FIRM, JANUS RESEARCH, INC. Ardurra Group Inc. has announced the acquisition of Janus Research, Inc., a cultural resource management firm that has served Florida clients for more than 40 years. Ardurra, ranked No. 75 on Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 list, is known for delivering complex engineering and design services to public and private entities across the United States. Founded in 1979 and based in Tampa, Florida, Janus Research helps protect and preserve important historical and cultural sites through comprehensive
assessment, planning, and compliance services. Their 21-person team ensures development projects meet federal and state preservation requirements while balancing progress with cultural stewardship across Florida’s diverse communities. The acquisition makes Ardurra a top- three cultural resource management provider in the state of Florida. “Janus Research, Inc. has earned an exceptional reputation over four decades in Florida’s cultural resource management market. As we continue building our CRM capabilities, their expertise and long-
standing relationships will significantly strengthen what we can offer clients,” said Ernesto Aguilar, PE, president and CEO of Ardurra. “Building our reputation for excellence and ethical research as a small firm hasn’t been easy, but our team has always maintained the highest professional standards,” said Ken Hardin, President of Janus Research. “Ardurra shares our values and approach to quality work. We’ve collaborated on projects before and have great respect for their colleagues. This partnership allows us to take our commitment to excellence to the next level.”
way to minimize all the paper checks traveling through snail mail). Firms that send electronic invoices with the ability for clients to pay electronically see a 14 percent decrease in the time to collect. And the more clients pay electronically, the more significant the decrease. firms need the right data at the right time to make decisions. How long does it take your firm to close the books each month? Do project status and staffing reports emerge at the click of a button, or after compiling spreadsheets for a few weeks (or never)? Are the reports and dashboards you use generated with live data, or are they relying on stale information? ■ Generate results and insights. Perhaps most important, For each of these steps, as with everything, improvement requires measurement – what speed-based metrics are most important? Where can firms cut time out of their processes? SPEED MATTERS, AND TECHNOLOGY IS CRITICAL TO DRIVING SPEED. I’m a big fan of simple prototyping for data collection or workflows before systematizing it. But by the time firms hit any real scale, most need technology to enable a consistent, fast process. For example, lead response and data management for proposals likely require a CRM system. Real- time data around projects or firm performance isn’t possible unless projects, time or progress tracking, and invoicing are all linked together seamlessly. And paper checks won’t go away without a means to invoice and collect payment electronically. Many firms have been reticent to invest in firm management tools in the same way they’ve invested in design tools, but the former is required for firms to move fast to meet the challenges of a quickly changing industry. One closing caveat: Building process and measuring results is not free. Trying to optimize across all phases simultaneously will mean sub-optimal results and may mean other areas of the firm suffer. Especially if you’re a small or midsized firm, pick one or two processes to optimize, and a couple of metrics to start tracking. You’ll get a quicker win and build momentum to improve speed across the rest of your firm. Matt Cooper is CEO of BQE Software, Inc. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
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on projects – to better understand how to price – can also help make fee-setting a more systematic rather than an ad hoc (and time-consuming) exercise. ■ Set up and staff projects. By the time firms grow to the point where firm leadership can no longer look around the room and know what everyone is working on, staffing becomes a challenge. And because people are the most valuable resource for AEC firms, there’s high leverage to being able to flex resources quickly. Even more important is moving fast enough to forecast work in the future. If firms don’t have visibility into their project pipeline and their staffing, they run into situations where they’re under-delivering for clients (understaffed) or giving away work (overstaffed) to drive up utilization. ■ Deliver great projects. For an industry where time and materials is unfortunately still the most common billing method, project delivery speed hasn’t always been a priority. However, speed matters. Faster delivery matters to clients and increases the value of the services you provide. Driving internal efficiencies will almost certainly pay off in the long run. Firms can track metrics like hours or days per phase (or appropriate unit). Tracking speed-plus-accuracy measures like percentage of on-time deliverables can help encourage firms to move faster as well. ■ Invoice and collect. Our 2025 Benchmarking Report suggests that firms take 57 days on average to get paid, but many firms take 50 percent to 100 percent longer than this. Time is money, and cutting your collection period has real cash flow and cost implications. Firms ought to be looking at their time to invoice and invoice-to-payment timing. We tend to see the former move slowly when firms have ill-defined invoicing processes and struggle to collate disparate data sources (i.e., across multiple systems). For invoice-to-payment, firms benefit from structured data around outstanding invoices and a client reminder system (and of course, a
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THE ZWEIG LETTER JULY 21, 2025, ISSUE 1594
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