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Your management questions, answered This month, readers seek advice on topics related to social media, benchmarking, and increasing prices. O P I N I O N
WHO SHOULD FIRMS COMPARE THEM- SELVES TO WHEN BENCHMARKING? Dear Christy, “We’re about to start our strategic planning process and like to use industry benchmarks as comparisons. When benchmarking, who should we compare ourselves to?” —Benchmarking in Bismark. Dear Benchmarking, This is a good question that has a complicated answer. I’ve found a lot of firms can get stuck on a single, unimportant characteristic that ends up steering them in the wrong direction.
HAVE MANAGEMENT QUESTIONS YOU NEED ANSWERED? Dear Christy is THE ZWEIG LETTER ’s newest column, a place for industry leaders to anonymously submit their most pressing leadership, management, finance, marketing, or human relations questions. Each month, submissions will be answered in print, so that the entire A/E/P and environmental consulting industry can benefit from the shared experiences and information highlights. Have a question you need answered? Email Christy Zweig at christinaz@zweiggroup.com or send your letter to Zweig Group, P.O. Box 1528, Fayetteville, AR 72702. Even if letters are signed or if emails contain the writer’s name, all entries will be kept confidential and published anonymously.
Christina Zweig DEAR CHRISTY
Start by defining what you are benchmarking and then customize the parameters to that particular metric. Metrics most firms are concerned about benchmarking usually include salary levels, spending/budgeting, marketing effectiveness, fees, and a variety of firm processes and procedures. Discipline, market sector, geography, size, and revenue are generally the most important benchmarking parameters. Salary levels are just about the only benchmark for which I would always recommend using a geographic parameter. Due to the internet, social media, and other new technologies, many firms who were previously only able to work in a very specific region can now work all over the nation and even the world, making geographic comparisons less important than they were in the past. Still, cost of living needs to be a consideration in any discussion about salaries. For most things, like marketing effectiveness, national overall figures for firms in the A/E/P industry are going to be applicable to almost anyone. If you think that just because you’re a small firm, you shouldn’t be getting the same hit rate on a press release or spending (the same percent) on marketing, you’re wrong. When you’re trying to benchmark things like budget amounts (marketing, business
development, labor, etc.) I would recommend benchmarking yourself against firms of a similar size and possibly a similar market. Ultimately you have to ask yourself: “Who do I want to compare yourself to – average firms who might be struggling in the same way you are – or high growth, high profit firms?” Zweig Group does a Successful Firms Survey , which pulls out data from all of our surveys and shows the differences between these groups and firmsoverall. WHY SHOULD A/E PROFESSIONALS USE SOCIAL MEDIA? Dear Christy, “Will social media really benefit us? It’s not like people hire transportation engineers or sports arena architects because they posted a cute picture on Twitter. Why do we need it?” —Reluctant in Raleigh Dear Reluctant, You’re right; I highly doubt you’ll get a big job off one Facebook post or tweet, but that’s just like saying you shouldn’t go on a date because it’s unlikely you’ll marry that person the very next day. If you want to get new clients, you’re going
See DEAR CHRISTY, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER January 18, 2016, ISSUE 1135
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