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F R OM T H E F O U N D E R
It’s time to take a good hard look at what everyone in your business is doing for you. The mad dash to add overhead staff O ne byproduct of the incredible success most AEC firms have enjoyed for the past decade or more has been the piling on of non-billable (overhead) staff in just about every corner of the business.
It’s not that some of these people can’t make great contributions to the firms they work for. They can, depending on the specific individual’s personality and capabilities, and what area of the business they work in. In-house recruiters can find the people the business needs to grow. Good marketing people can drive new clients to the firm. The best financial people can collect your money faster and give everyone the numbers they need to responsibly run their areas of the enterprise. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes, when companies find themselves with more business than they can handle and more profits than they are used to making, they will look for ways to spend it on things they think they “should” be doing. For example, some principals may think that they are so busy, and
get so many calls and emails, and have so much busy work, that they should hire an administrative assistant. That’s all well and good until it results in emails sent to the principal on Friday not being responded to until next Tuesday. Or how about all of the admins who get dragged into doing personal errands such as buying birthday presents for grandchildren or picking up their boss’s dry cleaning? I can’t say it wouldn’t be a nice luxury to have such a person doing whatever I wanted them to do, but how does the addition of this person truly help the company? Marketing departments have certainly grown like mad in the last decade. It’s no longer good enough for AEC firms to have a few highly motivated, diversely-
Mark Zweig
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER APRIL 25, 2022, ISSUE 1438
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