9
O P I N I O N
S ince the Great Recession, AEC leaders have been fixated on growth – and for good reason. But even when the “going is good,” much of that growth is doing damage and putting leadership teams and firms at risk. Do you want to survive the next year, the next recession, and the ongoing reset of the workplace, the marketplace, and the recruiting space? Scale your business, not your people
Our current growth model is a problem and won’t serve us well going forward either. Greater scale is what’s needed to build our business to win today and over the long-term. GROWTH VERSUS SCALE. Business growth and scale are often confused. Business growth can simply be an increase in revenue. Most often this requires an increase in expenses to support and sustain the new growth. For us in the AEC industry, that support is typically in the form of hiring additional talent to produce the new work. Business scale is different. It is a process of increasing revenue with little to no increase in
expenses while maintaining high quality. Scaling a product-based business is typically easier than a service-based business. “To progress professionally and generate profit, key individuals must take on increasing levels of responsibility and be leveraged over more clients and more staff.” THE PROBLEM WITH GROWTH. In general, we have a “one-to-many” distributed influence approach to growth in the AEC industry.
Peter Atherton
See PETER ATHERTON, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 8, 2019, ISSUE 1303
Made with FlippingBook Annual report